This chapter adopts new theoretical insights from cognitive science and dynamic systems theory and employs the notion of “metaphoricity” to explore how metaphor in discourse can be understood more adequately. Relating the ecological turn in cognitive science to metaphor studies and insisting on a unified bio-social perspective, it argues that metaphoricity – if conceptualized within an ecological framework – can offer an alternative to viewing metaphor as primarily social or cognitive. In-depth analyses of two real-life examples analyze metaphoricity as the act of doing metaphor within an interpersonal ecology established by the ongoing and dynamic presence of other people, physical artifacts and sociocultural constraints. Rather than treated as a product of individual minds, metaphor is thus shown to emerge from the dynamics of human dialogue viewed as a complex living system. The chapter focuses especially on how metaphoricity works as a gradable, interactively negotiated phenomenon that is intertwined with affective behaviors and situational affordances.