According to recent work in the new field of lexical pragmatics, the meanings of words are frequently pragmatically adjusted and fine-tuned in context, so that their contribution to the proposition expressed is different from their lexically encoded sense. Well-known examples include lexical narrowing (e.g. 'drink' used to mean ALCOHOLIC DRINK), approximation (or loosening) (e.g. 'flat' used to mean RELATIVELY FLAT) and metaphorical extension (e.g. 'bulldozer' used to mean FORCEFUL PERSON). These three phenomena are often studied in isolation from each other and given quite distinct kinds of explanation. In this chapter, we will propose a more unified account. We will try to show that narrowing, loosening and metaphorical extension are simply different outcomes of a single interpretive process which creates an ad hoc concept, or occasion-specific sense, based on interaction among encoded concepts, contextual information and pragmatic expectations or principles. We will outline an inferential account of the lexical adjustment process using the framework of relevance theory, and compare it with some alternative accounts.

I propose that an account of metaphor understanding which covers the full range of cases has to allow for two routes or modes of processing. One is a process of rapid, local, on-line concept construction that applies quite generally to the recovery of word meaning in utterance comprehension. The other requires a greater focus on the literal meaning of sentences or texts, which is metarepresented as a whole and subjected to more global, reflective pragmatic inference. The questions whether metaphors convey a propositional content and what role imagistic representation plays receive somewhat different answers depending on the processing route. or insightfulness of the metaphor (its accuracy in capturing an experience or feeling) would be to the point, and the same might hold also for the more prosaic (5).Clearly, some of the examples are more familiar, more frequently used (even conventionalized), than others: (1) tops the list in this respect, (2), (4), (5) and (6) are based on fairly familiar metaphorical schemes, and (3), 2 (7) and (8) are the most unusual and inventive, although the 'fog as a cat' has occurred before in English poetry. Some are spontaneous, spoken and conversational while others are highly wrought, extended over a length of text and clearly literary or poetic. I've tried to present a good range of linguistic forms rather than just the 'X is a Y' construction that sometimes dominates discussions. This is a frequent form in conversational metaphors where the aim is often to achieve a strong swift expression of praise or blame ('She's a saint/angel/bulldozer/pig/mouse/battle-axe/ dragon/block of ice/etc.'). It is also an easy form to convert into a corresponding simile, so serves well the purpose of those who want to explore the simile-metaphor relation. 3 In fact, there seem to be few, if any, formal linguistic restrictions on where a metaphorically used expression can appear in an utterance.Some of these properties seem to cluster together: being conversational, spontaneous, conventional, single-word metaphors and having a propositional content, on the one hand; being literary, carefully crafted, extended and developed, expressive of a feeling or sensation, highly imagistic, on the other hand. So it may seem that there are two kinds of metaphor, the 'ordinary' and the 'literary', and that we should not expect a single account that applies to both. While I don't think that there is a clear-cut distinction between two kinds of metaphor, I will argue that there are two different routes to the understanding of metaphors-a quick, local, on-line meaningadjustment process and a slower, more global appraisal of the literal meaning of the whole.As a philosophical backdrop to the dual processing account that I will present, the next section sets out two broad positions on the 2 The example in (3) is a line from a poem which is quoted more fully (in translation) in §v.3 Virtually every possible relation between a metaphor and its corresponding simile has its advocates: metaphors as elliptical similes, sim...

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:  The interpretation of metaphorical utterances often results in the attribution of emergent properties, which are neither standardly associated with the individual constituents in isolation nor derivable by standard rules of semantic composition. An adequate pragmatic account of metaphor interpretation must explain how these properties are derived. Using the framework of relevance theory, we propose a wholly inferential account, and argue that the derivation of emergent properties involves no special interpretive mechanisms not required for the interpretation of ordinary, literal utterances.

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