The most sustained and innovative recent work on metaphor has occurred in cognitive science and psychology. Psycholinguistic investigation suggests that novel, poetic metaphors are processed differently than literal speech, while relatively conventionalized and contextually salient metaphors are processed more like literal speech. This conflicts with the view of “cognitive linguists” like Georg...

Sarcasm is a form of communication that is intended to mock or harass someone by using words with the opposite of their literal meaning. However, identification of sarcasm is somewhat difficult due to the gap between its literal and intended meaning. Recognition of sarcasm is a task that can potentially provide a lot of benefits to other areas of natural language processing. In this research, w...

Language comprehension involves not only constructing the literal meaning of a sentence but also going beyond the literal meaning to infer what was meant but not said. One widely-studied test case is scalar implicature: The inference that, e.g., Sally ate some of the cookies implies she did not eat all of them. Research is mixed on whether this is due to a rote, grammaticalized procedure or ins...

This paper addresses the question whether and under which conditions hearers take into account the perspective of the speaker, and vice versa. Empirical evidence from computational modeling, psycholinguistic experimentation and corpus research suggests that a distinction should be made between speaker meanings and hearer meanings. Literal sentence meanings result from the hearer’s failure to ca...

This paper presents a computational model of referential metaphor comprehension. This model is designed on top of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a model of the representation of word and text meanings. Comprehending a referential metaphor consists in scanning the semantic neighbors of the metaphor in order to find words that are also semantically related to the context. The depth of that searc...

Despite flourishing research on the relationship between emotion and literal language, and despite the pervasiveness of figurative expressions in communication, the role of figurative language in conveying affect has been underinvestigated. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 619 German idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between affective and psycholin...

Literal and figurative meanings are two ends of a continuum we can not talk about sharp distinction between these meaning types (Dirven, 2002; Gibbs & Colston, 2012; Radden, 2002). Such exhibits different degrees figurativity. Radden (2002) considers this as literal-metonymy-metaphor continuum; where Dirven focuses on conceptual closeness distance the continuum. This study aims to analy...