Vagueness is poison to metaphoric clarity. It frustrates interpreters' effort to decode the coiner's intended message. What causes such vagueness? Quite possibly, it is due to the arbitrary nature that a metaphor has; two disparate entities of focus and frame spin off vagueness throughout the whole metaphoric structure. Most probably, frameshift is an antidote to rid metaphors of thick vagueness. In that sense, extralinguistic information is a good building block for a frameshift. However, extralinguistic information does not always trigger a frameshift, nor does it bring vagueness to bright light. Then, the ball is handed over to the arbitrariness because it is the axis to which all other inexplicable metaphoric phenomena converge.

• Hyun-Jee Kang(Kyungpook National University)
• Myung-Ki Oh(Kangwon National University) Corresponding author