ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book suggests that our ability to recognise metaphors in text can be accounted for by the Lexical Priming theory. It presents that there is order within the fuzziness of metaphor, and lexical characteristics can distinguish between metaphoricity and non-metaphoricity. The book argues that aspects of secondary meaning can account for metaphoricity, as much as grammatical structures or collocations. It explains another way in which the Lexical Priming theory could explain the lexical behaviour of conventionalised metaphoric language. To date, corpus linguistics has pushed furthest the argument that the linguistic patterns found in metaphor more complex than other theories can account for and that the importance of social interaction needs to form part of an adequate explanation of the data. A diachronic corpus analysis of metaphoric behaviour would allow to look at how metaphor and how lexical primings both change over time.
