1 DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS OF METAPHOR: AN EXPERIMENT IN AFFECT Gerard Steen Department of English, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands Gj.steen@let.vu.nl Abstract This paper present an experimental study of the distinction between the linguistic, conceptual and comunicative functions of metaphor in discourse. The study uses a song by Bob Dylan and creates three different reading conditions in which participants are requested to focus on the metaphors in the song as linguistic, conceptual or communicative structures. 39 metaphors have to be rated on three dimensions of affect. The results show that adopting a different mind set influences affective metaphor value in various ways. The findings are discussed and interpreted as providing support for the distinction between three discourse dimensions and functions for metaphor. 1. Introduction Partly because of the work of the dedicatee of this volume, it has become a common assumption among many linguists, psychologists, and other researchers of metaphor that metaphor should not be regarded as a linguistic phenomenon but as a conceptual one. But the distinction between linguistic and conceptual metaphor is only one aspect of the larger story of developments in metaphor studies. With reference to the role of linguistic and conceptual metaphor in reading, a connection has to be made with the multi-level approach to the psychology of reading as practised by, for instance, Walter Kintsch (1998) and his associates. In such reading research, language is presumably processed to build three mental representations of a text: a surface representation, a situation model, and a context model (cf. Van Oostendorp and Goldman 1999; Perfetti 1999). As a result, the relation between any metaphorical words on the page and their resulting interpretation by the reader has to be mediated by the construction of three different kinds of cognitive metaphor representations which may be incorporated into these three kinds of text representation (Steen 1994). Metaphors may hence be said to have three discourse functions in cognition: they express a meaning in the surface of the text, they embody an idea or represent a situation in the situation model, and they convey a message or an act in the context model, all at the same time. Consequently, from a discourse-analytical perspective, metaphors have to be analysed in three ways:  as expressions, which involves the linguistic investigation of their vocabulary and grammar;  as thoughts, which can be done by means of the conceptual analysis of their propositional content and knowledge structure;  as messages, which involves a communicative examination of their pragmatic structure and function in terms of co-text and context. A more general discussion of these views is presented in Steen (2005). To make these distinctions more concrete, consider the following metaphors from a lyric