Interpreting Figurative Meaning critically evaluates the recent empirical work from psycholinguistics and neuroscience examining the successes and difficulties associated with interpreting figurative language. There is now a huge, often contradictory literature on how people understand figures of speech. Gibbs and Colston argue that there may not be a single theory or model that adequately explains both the processes and products of figurative meaning experience. Experimental research may ultimately be unable to simply adjudicate between current models in psychology, linguistics and philosophy of how figurative meaning is interpreted. Alternatively, the authors advance a broad theoretical framework, motivated by ideas from 'dynamical systems theory', that describes the multiple, interacting influences which shape people's experiences of figurative meaning in discourse. This book details past research and theory, offers a critical assessment of this work and sets the stage for a new vision of figurative experience in human life.

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One of the important theoretical ideas in cognitive semantics is t hat imageSchemas and their transformations provide pari of the foundation for ihought, reasoning, and Imagination. Image Schemas are different patterns of recurring bodily experiences that emerge throughout sensorimotor activity andfrom our perceptual understanding ofactions andevents in the world. Our aim in this paper is to discuss some of the empirical evidence from psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology that is consistent with the idea that image Schemas and their transformations play important roles in human cognition. This experimental research was not conducted and has not generally been considered in terms ofthe cognitive linguistic ideas on image Schemas. However, a large body of research can be interpreted äs supporting the claim that image Schemas are indeed psychologically real andfunction in many aspects of how people process linguistic and nonlinguistic Information. Our review suggests possible ways of integrating this research with thefindings on linguistic structure and meaning in cognitive semantics.One of the important Claims of cognitive semantics is that much of our knowledge is not static, propositional and sentential, but is grounded in and structured by various patterns of our perceptual interactions, bodily actions, and manipulations of objects (Johnson 1987(Johnson , 1993Lakoff 1987 Lakoff , 1990 Talmy 1988). These patterns are experiential gestalts, called image Schemas, that emerge throughout sensorimotor activity äs we manipulate objects, Orient ourselves spatially and temporally, and direct our perceptual focus for various purposes (Johnson 1991).Studies in cognitive linguistics suggest that over two dozen different image Schemas and several image Schema transformations appear regularly in people's everyday thinking, reasoning, and Imagination (Johnson

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