  A better hope for the meaninglessness view are accounts of metaphor on which the metaphorical meaning does not depend on the literal meaning of the entire metaphorical sentence, but merely on the meaning of some sub-sentential phrases. For example according to Joseph Stern’s account (Stern 2000), when a sentence is used metaphorically, some of its sub-sentential phrases are embedded under a special operator called ‘Mthat’, which delivers as an output a new (contextually determined) metaphorical meaning for that phrase. Thus on Stern’s view, when used metaphorically the sentence ‘The poem is pregnant’ has the deeper structure ‘The poem is Mthat(pregnant)’, where ‘Mthat(pregnant)’ can be interpreted in context as, for example, the property of containing many ideas. When we consider such syntactically simple metaphors, Stern’s view seems entirely consistent with the meaninglessness view: at no stage in this interpretation are we required to assign a (literal) meaning to the entire categorically mistaken sentence. However, things become more difficult once we consider metaphors with a more complex structure. Thus consider the following conversation, discussing Jane’s research: