ABSTRACT
A radical way of exploring the frontier between semantics and psychology is to set up a combined discipline, psycholinguistics, at that boundary. The need for this move is not shown only by the concern that the image be incorporated into the properly semantic operation of metaphor. The very notion of transposition, the constant theme of a theory of tropes, brings operations into play that legitimate a mixed approach involving psychology and linguistics. We will deal with this motif in the present section, leaving till later the psycholinguistic consideration of the image itself.
