The distinction between literal and nonliteral meaning can be traced back to folk models about
the relationship between language and the world. According to these models sentences can be
seen as building a representation of the world they describe and understanding a sentence
means knowing how each linguistic element affects the construction of the representation.
Papers in this volume connect these folk models to the more scientific notions of the literal
nonliteral distinction proposed by philosophers linguists and cognitive scientists. The
current volume examines the literal nonliteral distinction from a number of disciplinary and
theoretical perspectives outlining some of the problematic assumptions in traditional
paradigms and pointing to promising directions for the study of meaning.
