ABSTRACT
This chapter is organised in terms of the unfolding story of how metaphor has been looked upon in theoretical pragmatic accounts of language. The starting point is an exploration of the birth of the first pragmatic models of metaphor against the background of the then prevailing views of metaphor in linguistics. The first pragmatic elaboration of Grice's programme focuses on notion of implicature and on what role it plays, at various points, in getting from 'what is (literally) said' to 'what is (metaphorically) meant'. The chapter explains on how distinct dimensions of metaphor have been thematised in the course of development of modelling metaphor in a pragmatic theory. It focuses on how metaphor can be recognised in relation to the process of implicature. The chapter also focuses on how the interpretation of metaphor is construed, and this is modelled as a broadening and narrowing of lexical meaning encoded in language, a process referred to as ad hoc concept formation.
