Many metaphors are structurally ambiguous between deliberate and non-deliberate meaning: the same utterance may in principle be used as metaphorically intended or not (Full article: The Ambiguity of Metaphor: How Polysemy Affords Multivalent Metaphor Use and Explains the Paradox of Metaphor). This is because most metaphors are based in polysemy, which allows for ambiguous reference that is oriented either to the target domain only (non-deliberate metaphor) or also includes the source domain (deliberate metaphor).

The resolution of this ambiguity typically requires the use of contextual information. This includes the speaker/hearer’s attitude, knowledge, expectations, and discourse goals, or previous utterances in the discourse. Disambiguating the language user’s intentions boils down to deciding whether the utterance requires making a comparison between referents in a source domain and a target domain, or not. This may happen relatively independently for production and reception.

This ambiguity has not been sufficiently attended to in modern metaphor research. DMT aims to examine its full impact on the meaning and comprehension of metaphor.

DMT postulates that most of this ubiquitous ambiguity is most often resolved without metaphorical comprehension for establishing an utterance’s meaning. This is possible because for most metaphor the intended figurative meaning in the target domain is already conventionally available in the language user’s mental dictionary, because of widespread metaphor-motivated polysemy.

This is the basis for the paradox of metaphor. (It may be possible that metaphorical processing occurs after the click of comprehension, enriching the understanding of the metaphor in post-hoc interpretation and other processes, as proposed by for instance Gibbs 2017; but this is another question that begs new questions.)