Biological methods collect and analyse data about the state of the brain and the body. They involve advanced new techniques, expensive equipment, and highly specialized expertise and are less widely spread in metaphor land. But they are crucial for addressing issues such as embodiment, attention, simulation, representation, intention, and consciousness. They hence raise fundamental questions about many concepts and assumptions made by other types of research.

One treatment of these issues for DMT is the book on attention to metaphor by Valentina Cuccio (2018).

Computational methods are a new category that has been developed in recent decades. Computational methods specify structures and functions as well as operations upon them which can model which behavioural processes occur in the mind and between people in interaction. This suggests that a methodological bridge may be built between the structural-functional analytical research, on the one hand, and the process-product behavioural research, on the other. The application of a computational approach to metaphor use, deliberate and non-deliberate, holds a promise for the future, where we may be able to simulate human behaviour with metaphor.

One starting point for computationally capturing the structures and functions of metaphor in discourse, including their likely deliberate or non-deliberate meaning, is Wmatrix, which computes the intended sense of polysemous words in utterances in discourse with over 90% accuracy. Since DMT depends on the CI model, a good starting point for further four-dimensional analysis may be offered by Lemaire et al.’s (2006) computational model for simulating text comprehension.