ABSTRACT
Discourse metaphors have been in the focus of intensive cognitive linguistic research in the last decades. This chapter deals with the cognitive status of both discourse and poetic innovative metaphors. It assumes that there is common ground for creating and decoding both types of metaphors. Innovative metaphors are extreme instances of semantic relations that need to be analyzed. The role of abstraction in decoding metaphors, especially poetic metaphors, and general issues of meaning relations and the structure of the lexicon are discussed. Specifically, it is argued that: (1) There is a semantics of metaphor; (2) Metaphors, including innovative poetic metaphors, are governed by rules that affect the process of accepting and interpreting metaphorical utterances; (3) One theory alone should deal with the two kinds of metaphors- poetic metaphors as well as discourse or conceptual (sometimes known as ‘dead’ or ‘frozen’) metaphors; (4) Metaphors have a logical-semantic basis; (5) A theory of decoding and interpreting innovative metaphors should also incorporate criteria for evaluating their beauty and value. The chapter highlights the procedure of ascending the scale of abstraction.
