Since the rise of Conceptual Metaphor Theory in the 1980s, metaphor theorists have investigated the diverse effects that metaphor has on cognitive processes. In certain situations—in political speech, for instance—it is noticed that metaphoric expressions are relatively frequent and play a decisive role. Some researchers—most notably, Steen—suggest that metaphors can be intentionally employed as metaphors in communication to achieve specific discourse goals. Thus, investigating the role of intentions behind metaphor use would shed light into the general question of why people resort to metaphors in specific contexts. Scholars generally take the utterers’ intentions to be individual mental states. In this paper, I examine another possibility. I argue that in the field of discourse analysis—as well as in Natural Language Processing applications—the notion of intention is best understood as a property attributed to linguistic acts. Building on Anscombe’s philosophy of intentional action, I conceive intentions as reasons for speaking as we do. Within this philosophical framework, I introduce the novel category of intentional_A metaphor, which refines existing notions of deliberate and purposeful metaphor. This alternative accounts for the observed asymmetries in production and reception of metaphor, and secures this approach from the most common critiques addressed to Deliberate Metaphor Theory.