Are metaphorical meanings fixed?
Speakers sometimes use words with little consideration of entailments, and hearers sometimes think very little about these entailments while interpreting an utterance (Steen, 1999). As Vervaeke and Kennedy suggest, a novel metaphor may be interpreted very differently by different audiences (1996, p. 283); following Clark (1996), I would suggest that most metaphors, including many of the most familiar, are subject to this indeterminacy. When a term such as attack, defend, or strategy appears in a discussion of an argument, we cannot be sure whether any particular person will associate the term with chess, boxing, or all-out war or with nothing beyond an abstract concept. How any particular speaker intends a metaphor to be interpreted, and how any particular hearer does interpret the metaphor, can never be absolutely determined. This indeterminacy of metaphors can be the occasion for serious miscommunication: Consider an argument between friends or spouses, described by one participant,
