1. The wonderful, chaotic, creative, heroic, challenging world of Researching and Applying Metaphor

This chapter provides a brief overview of the many intellectual accomplishments of real-world metaphor scholars during the past ten years, and offers my personal speculations about the course of future research on metaphor in the real world. I pay particular attention to methodological advances and the willingness of current metaphor scholars to address difficult problems in trying to study metaphor in various real-world contexts. This attention to methodological problems has direct implications for contemporary theories of metaphor, and several questions will likely attract the attention of metaphor scholars over the next ten years, many having to do with understanding the complexity of metaphoric meanings in context.