Pragmatic Forces in Conceptual Integration: How Blend Recruitment is Used to Make Metaphors More Compelling

Metaphor and analogy are cognitive tools which, in serving specific communicative goals and descriptive needs, are subject to a host of pragmatic pressures. Knowing that these pressures will shape the interpretation of a given metaphor, an effective communicator will exploit them to structure the conceptual content of the metaphor in such a way as to maximise its perceived aptness and argumentative force to the recipient. This paper considers the form that such pressures can take, and the computational strategies that a communicator can employ to maximise the effectiveness of a given metaphor. This consideration will address not only computational models of structured metaphor/analogy and conceptual blending, but computational accounts of the role, and importance, of similarity in metaphor. We choose as our domain of discourse a collection of visual metaphors which highlights the effect of pragmatic strategies on metaphoric communication.