In addition to the cross-domain mappings that conceptual metaphors bring with them, they can also provide additional, sometimes quite detailed knowledge. This is because aspects of the source domain that are not explicitly stated in the mappings can be inferred and mapped onto the source domain by specific linguistic utterances. In this way, metaphoric mappings can carry rich inferences known as metaphoric entailments. Consider the following examples which relate to the conceptual metaphor an argument is a journey:

1. We will proceed in a step-by-step fashion 2. We have covered a lot of ground In this metaphor, participants in the argument correspond to travelers, the argument itself corresponds to a journey and the progress of the argument corresponds to the route taken. However, in the source domain journey, travelers can get lost, they can stray from the path, they can fail to reach their destination and so on. The association between source and target gives rise to the entailment (the obligatory inference) that these events can also occur in the target domain argument. This is illustrated by the examples below which illustrate that structure that holds in the source domain can be inferred as holding in the target domain.

1. I got lost in the argument
2. We digressed from the main point
3. He failed to reach the conclusion
4. I couldn’t follow the argument