 If ‘city’ means ‘inhabitants of the city’, ‘asleep’ applies to it directly. If it means the place with its infrastructure, ‘asleep’ has to adjust to mean something to the effect of ‘quiet’, ‘dark’ or ‘showing no movement’. But neither of the processes has a clear point of departure: there is no obvious, clearly definable move from literal to non-literal. Such co-occurrence comes with degrees of salience of certain meanings. Such options can also be viewed as ‘probabilistic meanings’ that are ‘contextually affirmed’, to use Allan’s (2011: 185) terminology, through nonmonotonic inferences either in the co-text or by some other factor in the common ground.