 When we take an uttered sentence as a metaphor, we assign it a new and distinctively metaphorical meaning. The assignment of fresh meaning to the sentence as a whole results from a more local assignment of fresh meaning to one or more of the sentence’s constituent words or phrases, the ones we take metaphorically, the focal words or phrases. The meanings assigned the remainder of the sentence, the framing words or phrases, remain unchanged. (Here it’s taken for granted that whatever meanings may be, they obey a compositionality principle, according to which the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its elementary components and the manner in which those components are woven together by the complex expression’s syntax.)