This article discusses some of the claims of the earlier and later versions of the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (CTM) and addresses some of the criticism that has been leveled against it. It is argued that much of this criticism arises from common misconceptions as to the real claims made by the theory. However, CTM is still in need of further exploration and empirical support. In this connection, we identify some areas where research is still needed and supply our own developments. We argue for a more complex classification of metaphor types, which takes into account various complementary taxonomic perspectives, including the nature of source and target and the genericity and complexity of the metaphoric operation. We also explore metaphor in relation to cognitive prominence and conceptual interaction issues. Finally, we deal with the problem of constraints on metaphor and make a proposal for three complementary kinds of constraint.

This monograph studies cognitive operations on cognitive models across levels and domains of meaning construction. It explores in what way the same set of cognitive operations, either in isolation or in combination, account for meaning representation whether obtained on the basis of inferential activity or through constructional composition. As a consequence, it makes explicit links between constructional and figurative meaning. The pervasiveness of cognitive operations is explored across the levels of meaning construction (argument, implicational, illocutionary, and discourse structure) distinguished by the Lexical Constructional Model. This model is a usage-based approach to language that reconciles insights from functional and cognitive linguistics and offers a unified account of the principles and constraints that regulate both inferential activity and the constructional composition of meaning. This book is of value to scholars with an interest in linguistic evidence of cognitive activity in meaning construction. The contents relate to the fields of Cognitive Grammar, Cognitive Semantics, Construction Grammar, Functional Linguistics, and Inferential Pragmatics. Cognitive Modeling has been awarded the 2015 prize of the Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics (Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada, AESLA) for work by experienced researchers.

This chapter begins with a distinction made in Ruiz de Mendoza and Peña (2005) between two broad kinds of cognitive operations: formal and content operations. The former are higher-level processes whose activity is necessary for lower-level processes to take place. The latter are used to make inferences on the basis of cues provided by the linguistic expression and its context. The chapter proposes that metonymy can be broken down into two content operations, domain expansion and domain reduction, the latter of which can be further broken down into other two processes: facetization and zone activation. It then explores how these operations relate to or contrast with other content operations and the way in which they are supported by formal operations.

This article proposes the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM) as an explanatorily adequate model for the investigation of meaning construction at all levels of linguistic description, including pragmatics and discourse. The LCM has an argument structure module or level 1 module consisting of elements of syntactically relevant semantic interpretation. Then it has three basically idiomatic modules dealing with cognitively entrenched meaning implications deriving from the application of low-level and high-level inferential schemas (levels 2 and 3 respectively) and with discourse aspects of meaning, especially cohesion and coherence phenomena (level 4). Each level is either subsumed into a higher-level constructional configuration or acts as a cue for the activation of a relevant conceptual structure that yields an implicit meaning derivation. Interaction between lexical and constructional configurations (at whatever description level) is regulated by a number of constraints that are either internal or external to the process.