Metaphor from the ground up: understanding figurative language in context

'Metaphor from the Ground Up' introduces conceptual filtering theory, a theory of mental processing that describes figurative language communication in terms of conceptual domain projection and contextual disambiguation.

In an attempt to match theoretical observations from cognitive semantics and pragmatics with related knowledge about mental processes from cognitive neuroscience, CFT first examines the distributed nature of conceptualization and then uses this background information to explain metonymic 'binding' and metaphoric 'mapping.' Once the perceptual origins of metonymy and metaphor have been demonstrated, CFT offers a detailed account of how salient aspects of conceptualization differentially combine to achieve predictable inferencing results in linguistic communication.