Previous research indicates that mental representations of word meanings are distributed along both semantic and syntactic dimensions such that nouns and verbs are relatively distinct from one another. Two experiments examined the effect of representational distance between meanings on recognition of ambiguous spoken words by comparing recognition of unambiguous words, noun-verb homonyms, and n...

Listening to employees day after day, one might be forgiven for believing that all employers are tarred with the same brush. Here is a story about two employees who reminded me of how organizations can and do treat their workers differently. Explaining to the first patient that their convalescence ought to be coming to an end, I had initiated an exploration of some avenues for a phased return t...

The present study is focused on the automatic identification and description of frozen similes in British and French novels written between the 19 century and the beginning of the 20 century. Two main patterns of frozen similes were considered: adjectival ground + simile marker + nominal vehicle (e.g. happy as a lark) and eventuality + simile marker + nominal vehicle (e.g. sleep like a top). Al...

English uses the same prepositions to describe both spatial and temporal relationships (e.g., at the corner, at 1:30), and other languages worldwide exhibit similar patterns. These space-time parallelisms have been explained by the Metaphoric Mapping Theory, which maintains that humans have a cognitive predisposition to structure temporal concepts in terms of spatial schemas through the applica...