Metaphorical Reasoning with an Economical Set of Mappings

There exist a broad class of metaphorical utterances that, although widely reported, have received little detailed examination. These metaphors are not totally novel; instead, the vehicles contain novel extensions to familiar conceptual metaphors. That is, they (a) rest on a conceptual metaphor that is familiar to the understander but (b) transcend the list of mappings in the conceptual metaphor because they contain concepts not handled by them. We argue against the creation of new source to target mappings for these novel concepts and argue instead that (possibly extensive) reasoning can occur in the source domain. This allows these concepts to connect either to the mappings in an existing conceptual metaphor, or to mappings which are adjuncts to any conceptual metaphor. We justify these adjunct mappings and provide a partial inventory of their types. We believe our approach has benefited from the discipline imposed by implementing it in a computer system.