COMMENTARY ON NONLITERAL LANGUAGE - PROCESSING AND USE

The three articles in this issue deal with how metaphors and irony are understood as well as with the uses of metaphor and irony in discours e. I discuss alternative models of metaphor comprehension and also pro pose a general model of discourse irony that is consistent with the fi ndings reported by Dews and Winner and by Kreuz and Roberts. In both t he metaphor and irony models, literal meaning is treated as an integra l part of the comprehension process wherein literal meanings are used directly to arrive at the figurative intentions of speakers.