ABSTRACT
Another point that has hitherto received insufficient attention in metaphor studies is the matter of individual subjects’ interpretations. What holds for metaphors holds for texts in general: there may be significant differences in interpretation across (groups of) individuals (see Morley 1983; Camargo 1987; Ang 1991; Larsen et al. 1991). The importance of this issue was realized by Johnson and Malgady. Reporting on some of their own earlier empirical research on metaphor comprehension, they somewhat worriedly make the following observation:
The problem comes when you attempt to look at the content of the interpretations provided by individual subjects, and the variability of the
goodness judgments provided by subjects. It is frustrating to realize that even though you can find a great deal of regularity in the way in which populations of subjects deal with populations of metaphors, we can say much less about how an individual subject will interpret an individual metaphor. When you examine the individual responses that subjects give when they are presented with a word to associate to, or a metaphor or painting to interpret, you find that they usually make sense, even though they show considerable diversity in their content.
