Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond

This chapter provides a brief tour through the history of psycholinguistics with a running thread that follows the work of Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and an evolution toward more ecologically valid approaches and interactive embodied perspectives on how language works. Rather than treating language as though it were a static object with parts that invite removing and analyzing, contemporary psycholinguists and cognitive scientists are treating language more like an event that happens over time. This