Is figurative interpretation an outcome of ambiguity?

Living metaphors are interpretations of inconsistent complex meanings, which are typically open to more than one interpretative option. The green woods laugh, which attributes a human behaviour to woods, opens up four options. Besides (1) a literal one, it depicts a fictive world; it allows for three figurative interpretations: two metaphors—namely, (2) some sounds in woods are seen as laughs, and (3) laughing woods are seen as human beings—and (4) a metonymy—people walking in the woods laugh. The hypothesis is that the manifold relation between conflictual meanings and figures is not a form of ambiguity but is justified by the inconsistency of the input meaning, whose specific inner conceptual structure justifies the access to one, two or three figures. The analysis also underlines the specificity of figurative interpretation as distinct from pragmatic interpretation.