In this volume, Rachel Giora explores how the salient meanings of words--the meanings that stand out as most prominent and accessible in our minds--shape how we think and how we speak. For Giora, salient meanings display interesting effects in both figurative and literal language. In both domains, speakers and writers creatively exploit the possibilities inherent in the fact that, while words have multiple meanings, some meanings are more accessible than others. Of the various meanings we encode in our mental lexicon for a given word or expression, we ascribe greater cognitive priority to...

This special double issue of Metaphor and Symbol focuses on models of figurative language. The contributors address: salience and context effects; moment-by-moment reading of proverbs in literal and nonliteral contexts; convention, form and figurative language processing; and more.