One of the prime motivations for maintaining a belief in a literal meaning stems from the phenomenological experience that different kinds of meaning are recovered during interpretation of figurative and literal language. It is the intermediate nature of much figurative language that makes its meaning seem special and, by contrast, literal meanings so ordinary and primary. One reason why many scholars believe that figurative language violates communicative norms is that they confuse the process and products of linguistic understanding. The understanding of linguistic expression reveals that interpretation and recognition involve tremendous diversity in the emphasis on different temporal points at which text has supposedly been understood .