ABSTRACT
Metaphor drives innovation in language. New meanings are not necessarily metaphorical, but metaphor provides the grounds for new referents to be identified using old words. Speakers ‘stretch’ the meanings of the words they know when they need to communicate something that they have no existing word for. If that stretched meaning fills a vocabulary gap in the language, making it possible for speakers to talk about an object or concept that had no previously established wording, it gets absorbed into the language system where it becomes available for further exploitation, and the process starts all over again.
