Metaphor and Lexical Semantics∗

This paper shows that several sorts of expressions cannot be inter-preted metaphorically, including determiners, tenses, etc. Generally, functional categories cannot be interpreted metaphorically, while lex-ical categories can. This reveals a semantic property of functional categories, and it shows that metaphor can be used as a probe for investigating them. It also reveals an important linguistic constraint on metaphor. The paper argues this constraint applies to the inter-face between the cognitive systems for language and metaphor. How-ever, the constraint does not completely prevent structural elements of language from being available to the metaphor system. The paper shows that linguistic structure within the lexicon, specifically, aspec-tual structure, is available to the metaphor system. This paper takes as its starting point an observation about which sorts of expressions can receive metaphorical interpretations. Surprisingly, there are a number of expressions that cannot be interpreted metaphorically. Quantifier expressions (i.e. determiners) provide a good example. Consider a richly metaphorical sentence like