concepts that are associated with the same source domain are often related to each other in the way we conceptualise them, but their meanings are not necessarily synonymous or even semantically close. Compare, for example, the target concepts MARRIAGE and POLITICAL REGIME. Although not directly related in semantic space, they are both metaphorically mapped to the source concept of MECHANISM (e....

Giora's [Giora, R., 1997. Understanding figurative and literal language: the Graded Salience Hypothesis. Cogn. Linguist. 7 (1), 183-206; Giora, R., 2003. On Our Mind: Salience Context and Figurative Language. Oxford Univ. Press, New York] Graded Salience Hypothesis states that more salient meanings-coded meanings foremost on our mind due to conventionality, frequency, familiarity, or prototypic...

The present study examines non-native (L2) and native (L1) listeners' access to figurative idiomatic meaning and literal constituent meaning in two cross-modal priming experiments. Proficient German learners of English (L2) and native speakers of American English (L1) responded to English target words preceded by English idioms embedded in non-biasing prime sentences in a lexical decision task....

ART DEFINITION FIGURATIVE ART Almost all art is abstract art, if we take abstraction to be a process of drawing inspiration from the shape, color and texture of objects. Artists have "abstracted" from the world around them since prehistoric times. But it was not until the early twentieth century that abstraction began to be explored as an end in itself. Abstract art tends to rely on the associa...

Effective models of social dialog must understand a broad range of rhetorical and figurative devices. Rhetorical questions (RQs) are a type of figurative language whose aim is to achieve a pragmatic goal, such as structuring an argument, being persuasive, emphasizing a point, or being ironic. While there are computational models for other forms of figurative language, rhetorical questions have ...

This study examines the processing of metaphoric reference by bilingual speakers. English dominant, Spanish dominant, and balanced bilinguals read passages in English biasing either a figurative (e.g., describing a weak and soft fighter that always lost and everyone hated) or a literal (e.g., describing a donut and bakery shop that made delicious pastries) meaning of a critical metaphoric refer...

Literal meaning has been defined as linguistic meaning, i.e., as nonfigurative, coded, fully compositional, context-invariant, explicit, and truth conditional (Katz, Jerrold J., 1977. Propositional structure and illocutionary force. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell). Nonliteral meaning is seen as its counterpart, i.e., as extralinguistic, figurative, indirect, inferred, noncompositional, context-dep...

Previous research has given inconsistent evidence about whether familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than literal expressions. In 2 eye-tracking-while-reading experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the difficulty associated with processing metonyms would depend on sentence structure. Experiment 1 examined comprehension of familiar place-for-institution metonyms (e.g., college) wh...