Paivio concluded his chapter in the first edition of this collection with the lament that much of the psychological research on metaphor had not been directed at really fundamental problems in the area. In the last paragraph, he wrote:

The present chapter describes a step toward redressing this lack of relevant research.

The particular issues I am addressing involve the last point raised by Paivio and Walsh, namely, the nature of the speaker's response to a novel metaphor. However, I want to go further than just determining the facts of what interpretation is provided by the native speaker to a novel metaphorical utterance and suggest that in order to evaluate such facts, we must examine the following general question: To what extent is the interpretation of a metaphorical expression (or at least the most probable interpretation) predictable on the basis of the linguistic properties of the utterance alone? There are several subquestions: If the metaphorical utterance is given out of context, do speakers agree on the most likely interpretation?