Important challenges in the study of metaphors

Abstract

The world of metaphor scholarship is amazingly diverse, involving a myriad of empirical methods and theoretical frameworks. This diversity is greatly appealing, given the enormous complexity of metaphorical thinking, language, and human action. This chapter identifies some challenges for metaphor scholars both in doing particular empirical work and in offering theoretical accounts of metaphor and its role in human life. These challenges focus on issues with metaphor identification, the meanings of metaphor in discourse, online metaphor processing, and the metaphorical character of source domains. I see these challenges as “matters for all of us to think about” as we try to explain both the regularities and variations in metaphorical thinking, language, and multimodal action.