1. If metaphorical utterance is given out of the context, do speakers agree on the most likely interpretations?

2. And where speakers differ, are the differences explainable in terms of speakers’ characteristics, such as age, education, sex, cultural background and the like?

3. And where there is agreement, can the properties which give rise to this agreement be inferred, and to what extent are such properties part of a linguistic description of the utterance?

To investigate the stated above questions B. Fraser constructed four sets of twenty-eight sentences, each sentence having been judged clearly semantically anomalous by two or more native speakers. The groups consisted of declarative sentences having the following form:

Group A: “He’s an X”.

Group B: “She is an X”

Group C: “He is like an X”

Group D: “She is like an X”.

Thus groups A and B contained metaphorical expressions, differing only in the gender of the subject; groups C and D contained similes, again differing only in the subject gender^. The value of X in the test were nouns chosen in as completely unsystematic fashion as possible. No attempt was made to control the conceptual categories from which values of the X were chosen. The subjects for judgments consisted of 10 men and 30 women all native speaking college students in the greater Boston area. The age rang was from 19 to 38. No attempt was made to control for ethnic or cultural background.

The basic question – whether a metaphor in zero context receives a consistent interpretation – was answered clearly in the negative, except for the two cases (He is a dog and She is like a snail – dogs are nearly always ugly; snails are almost always slow). All the other interpretations were different as may be seen from the examples provided below where metaphor and simile cases were combined. For X=”termite” the following (edited) responses were obtained:

He: is a pest, is destructive, eats a lot, eats a little, is little, tears at your sense of self, bores into any conversation, is deceptive, picks things apart, is a parasite, is always worrying about you, is always in the way, is pretty, is undermining, is insidious, is devious;

She: is nosey, is always eating, is tiny, eats you out of everything, is a pain in the ass, spends money quickly, is small, is bothersome, is a leech, is relentless, hides, is unwanted, keeps nagging, digs into other’s business, is destructive, has a small brain, is dumb, is afraid of herself.

And one more example for X=”an octopus”.

He: is all arms, climbs, does a lot, is clumsy, is aggressive, is motor-oriented, is into everything, can’t keep his hands off girls, is grabby.

She: does lots at once, is always hugging and touching, has fingers in many pies, is domineering, is manipulative, is great on first dates, is all over the place, touches everything, is grabby.

Judging by these two examples as well as many others provided by B.Fraser in his paper, we can conclude that there are no “most probable interpretations” for zero-context similes and metaphors. Relying on the data of his research B.Fraser arrives at the four conclusions:

1. There is often a clear interpretation in terms of a positive or negative evaluation of the expression (e.g. The case with “termite” nearly always produced a negative interpretation. This might, of course, be predetermined by the shared belief that termites are generally undesirable).

2. There is often, though not always, a significant distinction between the predictions of the expression for “he” as opposed to “she” for both male and female judges (e.g. If a male is an octopus, he is nearly always aggressive, all hands, after a woman, oversexed, and only occasionally a busy person. A female who is an octopus, however, is much less aggressive, and grabby, and is more often seen as busy, liberated, ambitious, and the like).

3. Although none of the examples was (consciously) picked for any sexual connotation, nearly every test item evoked two or more interpretations which were sexually oriented. These sexual interpretations were by no means located solely with one or two individuals, nor were they made predominantly by the male as opposed to female judges. The reason for this might be that metaphors are so often used as a device to mask sexual information, though there is no any empirical evidence which bears on this.

4. Though there is wide variation of interpretations provided by the judges, they still have much in common as they relate to three main types of characteristics: a) a physical characteristic (e.g. ugly, fat), b) a behavioral characteristic (does lots at once, is aggressive), c) a functional characteristic of the object (none in the given examples, but in some others were: “predicts spring”, etc.).

The author doesn’t make comments on the role of education as well as cultural and ethnic background as they were not controlled. Nor does the author provide evidence that the sex of the judge played any role in resulting interpretation [36].

A certain clue to the problem of metaphor interpretation and to the kinds of competencies required may provide the research in the field of language acquisition which attempts the analysis of errors children make when interpreting metaphor.

First of all, when children misinterpret metaphors, they rarely take them as literally true statements. Nor do they take them as literal falsehoods (errors or lies). Rather, they typically derive a non-literal meaning, that is a meaning different from a sentence meaning. In their interpretation they use similarities, but fail to find the intended by the speaker similarity on which the metaphor is based. Thus, for example such metaphor as “the prison guard has become a hard rock” they understand that he had strong muscles rather than that he was unfeeling [123].

There is compelling evidence based on numerous investigations that metaphor comprehension may present certain difficulties for children due to two main reasons. As metaphor comprehension requires recognition that things in the world are classified into separate domains, children’s failure to understand some metaphors may be due to insufficient knowledge about one or both domains on which the metaphor is based.

The second reason is the lack of experience due to which children fail to perceive certain types of similarities [122; 123].

Metaphor is not the only use of nonliteral language. Such instances as metonymy and irony, also present certain challenges from the point of view of their comprehension.