In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Andrew Goatly looks at how we use metaphor to communicate meaning. Combining insights from functional linguistics and relevance theory, he provides a powerful model for understanding how metaphors work in real communicative situations, how we use them to comm[...]

How are humorous meanings generated and interpreted? Understanding a joke involves knowledge of the language code (a matter mostly of semantics) and background knowledge necessary for making the inferences to get the joke (a matter of pragmatics). This book introduces and critiques a wide range of s[...]