Computability as a Limiting Cognitive Constraint: Complexity Concerns in Metaphor Comprehension about which Cognitive Linguists should be Aware

If metaphor is to be viewed as a fundamental cognitive agency, as recent work suggests, what ramifications does this view have for a model of semantic memory? This paper presents a computational treatment of metaphor comprehension, named Sapper (see Veale & Keane. 1993, 1994; Veale et al. 1995, 1996), which is built upon a parallel, adaptive, and learning network model of semantic memory. Sapper is a hybrid symbolic connectionist model which views the interpretation of novel metaphors as a process of connectionist bridge-building, a process which subsequently alters the activation dynamics between different conceptual schemata in semantic memory, thereby causing these schemata to interact (following Black, 1962) in a representationally dynamic fashion.