In a short autobiographical piece published in the New York Times Magazine, an author writes about his childhood:

My first friend was Slobo. I was still living in Yugoslavia at the time, and not far from my house there was an old German truck left abandoned after the war. It had no wheels. No windshield. No doors. But the steering wheel was intact. Slobo and I flew to America in that truck. It was our airplane. Even now, I remember the background moving as we took off down the street, across Europe, across the Atlantic.

He goes on (a few paragraphs later) to talk about an incident in his adult life:

A few years ago, we were swimming at a beach in East Hampton. The Atlantic! The very Atlantic I had flown over in my German truck with Slobo.

Now little of this is “true” in the sense that philosophers and linguists often cherish. So what is going on?

On one view, such uses of language are deviations, and like metaphor, metonymy, or other so-called rhetorical devices, they are parasitic on core semantics and literal meaning.

In this book, on the contrary, they are taken to be central, and much more widespread than is usually assumed. Understanding the linguistic organization involved leads to the study of domains that we set up as we talk or listen, and that we structure with elements, roles, strategies, and relations. These domains—or interconnected mental spaces, as I shall call them—are not part of the language itself, or of its grammars; they are not hidden levels of linguistic representation, but language does not come without them.