Abstract

Research on metaphor in the last few decades has made it obvious that it is a fundamental form of communication and cognition. The models and theories that have emerged, especially conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), hint at the sensory basis of metaphorization. However, CMT still lacks a ‘sensory-based framework’ for explaining how concrete forms of reasoning are transformed metaphorically to produce abstractions known within CMT as idealized cognitive models. This paper discusses one possible framework, developed from previous work in this area, called ‘sense-implication,’ so that it can be used as a means to conduct future work on the relation between metaphor and cognition.