 In the late 1970s, linguists interested in analogical reasoning and reading comprehension came to believe that pragmatic twist accounts in the style of Grice and Searle could be subjected to rigorous laboratory tests, using techniques originally developed for the psycholinguistics of reading. They reasoned that if metaphorical construals of language are based on prior literal construals and get constructed and assessed only when available literal construals fail to equip an utterance with a contextually pertinent message, we should expect subtle processing delays in the comprehension of metaphors, delays absent from the comprehension of comparably familiar literal locutions and idioms. And we should expect available metaphorical interpretations of utterances to go unnoticed when they’re irrelevant to the cognitive task at hand. An agenda-setting study by Ortony et al (1978) reported results broadly consistent with Grice and Searle. But before long further studies in the same style (Glucksberg, Gildea, and Booklin, 1982; Blasko and Connine, 1993) claimed to have empirically refuted pragmatic twist theory. A search began for accounts on which metaphorical construals could be simple uniform functions of the literal consturals on which they are based, able to compete with literal rivals on a level playing field from the very beginning of utterance processing.