Explicatures are derived when an incomplete logical form, an assumption schema, is developed into a full proposition (the explicated meaning) through a number of cognitive processes, including disambiguation, saturation, loosening, but also, according to Ruiz de

Mendoza, metaphor and metonymy. In the case of metaphor, the authors argue that the number of potential explicatures correlates with the complexity of the metaphorical

mapping structure, ranging from one-correspondence to many-correspondence metaphors (Ruiz de Mendoza 1998), and that the principle of relevance guides the inferential process towards the contextually most relevant explicature.