Ilaria Rizzato ^*

• University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

The next section provides a brief overview of the contributions to the Research Topic. In order to highlight major points of contact among articles, five major thematic areas have been identified, including the conceptualizing potential of metaphors, metaphor comprehension in learning and teaching processes, semantics and metaphor processing, metaphor and multimodality, and new contributions to metaphor theory. The articles have been assigned to one thematic category for the sake of simplicity and tidiness, but this classification is not meant to be exhaustive of the possible similarities, analogies and interconnections that may emerge from a full reading of each contribution. This is a provisional file, not the final article Questions of meaning-making through figurative language are also prominent in the articles dealing 76 with semantics and metaphor processing. Al-Azary and Katz studies the role of two semantic 77 richness variables in metaphor production: semantic neighborhood density (SND), which measures 78 the proximity of a word and its associations in semantic space, and body-object interaction (BOI), 79 which reflects the ease with which a human body can motorically interact with a word's referent. Renaissance texts and reveals that metaphorical concepts in emblems predominantly rely on conflict 100 rather than similarity. 101 More traditional views are questioned in the final section, where major theoretical tenets on the 102 nature and behavior of metaphors are addressed and explored. Garello and Carapezza challenge what 103 they call "the Natural Kind Assumption," that is, the widespread notion that despite their differences, 104 metaphors share many properties and a theory of metaphor should capture such essential properties. 105In their article they subvert this assumption and discuss the main consequences of this view shift on 106 the philosophical plane. Colston discusses the conceptualization of metaphor as an entity relying on 107 the dual structure of source and target and traces the success of such conceptualization back to the 108 human need for shared interpretative patterns for complex meanings. Thus, simpler dual frameworks 109 tend to prevail, in spite of the many advantages multiple structures may provide in the analysis of 110 complex phenomena. Finally,