Ambridge's proposal cannot account for the most basic observations about phonological patterns in human languages. Outside of the earliest stages of phonological production by toddlers, the phonological systems of speakers/learners exhibit internal behaviours that point to the representation and processing of inter-related units ranging in size…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

An evaluation of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) offered by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. in this issue suggests a number of important opportunities for future research that may be based on interesting research findings produced over the past 3 decades in response to CMT. This reply to Gibbs argues that the main question for discourse processing remains…

In an earlier article I drew a distinction between two general types of listening. In one the listener brings pre-determined categories to bear in extracting useful information from the speaker's utterance. In the other the listener suspends such categories to hear as much as possible in the utterance. This distinction has been challenged by…

Presents a syntax of metophor, discussing a typology of metaphor, the relationship between literal sense and figurative sense, and the importance of a precise definition of metaphor. (AM)