Science is generally divided between theory and research, with methods building a bridge between, and application utilizing their outcome for doing further research on evidence-based interventions. There is hence a general sense of ‘theory’, which is distinct from the particular sense of one or more different theories competing with each other.

DMT is one such theory, and it is situated in an encompassing theoretical framework which accommodates alternative theories, including, in our case, Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The theoretical framework is hence an inventory of theoretical concepts and propositions that tells you where the elements of the theory come from. In our case it includes the widely accepted definition of metaphor as understanding one thing in terms of something else. DMT has made a beginning with developing such a framework for its own theory of metaphor comprehension in Slowing metaphor down. Core elements of the theoretical framework were identified as cognitive activities (production versus reception, including comprehension), levels of cognition (language use versus discourse), cognitive processes (lexical disambiguation versus analogy), and speed of cognition (fast versus slow thinking).

The theory of DMT itself is an ordered, coherent set of theoretical propositions that tells you how specific configurations of the theoretical framework interact for specific areas of research. Thus, DMT is a theory about metaphor comprehension (activity) in language use (level) with expectations about the occurrence of analogy (processes) and their relation to fast and slow thinking (speed). This is related to another theory of metaphor, Bowdle and Gentner’s Career of Metaphor Theory, which formulates views of the variation in metaphor and its processing over time (and hence in principle requires another theoretical framework that goes into language change).

As a specific theory, DMT gives rise to a model for metaphor comprehension, while allowing for other, related models that may be developed in future work, for instance for the activities of metaphor understanding and metaphor production. In the case of DMT, this model is a tailored version of Van Dijk and Kintsch’s Construction-Integration model for all utterance comprehension. The DMT model itself is a set of theoretical propositions that tells you how metaphor comprehension is organized and works.

Essential to this model are the hypotheses that offer precise claims about the relations between the propositions in the theory. The central hypothesis in DMT is that not all metaphor in language use and discourse works as a metaphor in metaphor comprehension and interaction: not all metaphor requires comprehension by analogy. This again points to the distinction and interaction between metaphor as structure and metaphor as process.