What do metaphors of understanding hide?

Many previous studies on the conceptual function of metaphors have focused on their func-tion of highlighting aspects of target concepts. From the beginning of this research, it was knownthat conceptual metaphors also hide aspects of the target concept; however, this as-pect has been less studied. This study builds upon the idea that the hiding aspect of a specific metaphor should be identified in relation to other metaphors for the same concept. A method is presented to detail this relation based on the theory of semantic frames and the FrameNet resource to identify the hidden aspects and apply it to a corpus of 298 elicited metaphor texts on the target concept of understanding. The analysis revealed that certain conceptual aspects are consistently hidden by a majority of metaphors, pointing to patterns in conceptualization. Using this approach, six aspects frequently hidden by metaphors were identified: Sociality, Transfer, Ownership, Perception, Foundation and Duration.