A Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach to the Interpretation Process of Metaphorical Utterances

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Metaphor is based on the cognition of various levels of similarity. This research revealed two points : 1) that metaphorical-utterance interpretations involve the addressee's construction, with her/his minimal efforts, of an abstracted schema which is the result of an elaboration to include its source as a prototype and its target as a (peripheral) member, and 2) that metaphorical utterances based on the story-level similarity communicate a new type of implicatures drawn by relevance-constrained inductive inference rules. These results lead to the radical modification and advancement of the most promising cognitive pragmatic theory, "Relevance Theory".