Analogy researchers do not often examine gesture, and gesture researchers do not often borrow ideas from the study of analogy. One borrowable idea from the world of analogy is the importance of distinguishing between attributes and relations. Gentner (, ) observed that some metaphors highlight attributes and others highlight relations, and called the latter analogies. Mirroring this logic, we o...

Since Saussure, the idea that the forms of words are arbitrarily related to their meanings has been widely accepted. Yet, implicit metaphorical mappings may provide opportunities for iconicity throughout the lexicon. We hypothesized that vertical spatial metaphors for emotional valence are manifested in language through space in signed languages and through the spatialized dimension of pitch in...

What influences the likelihood that a word will be used metaphorically? We tested whether the likelihood of metaphorical use is related to the relationality of a word’s meaning. Relational words name relations between entities. We predicted that relational words, such as verbs (e.g., speak) and relational nouns (e.g., marriage) would be more likely to be used metaphorically than words that name...

Humans turn abstract referents and discourse structures into gesture using metaphors. The semantic relation between abstract communicative intentions and their physical realization in gesture is a question that has not been fully addressed. Our hypothesis is that a limited set of primary metaphors and image schemas underlies a wide range of gestures. Our analysis of a video corpus supports this...

From early 20th century headlines to presidential tweets, immigration is described frequently in terms of waves, floods, and tides. Although usage this inundation metaphor has been widely documented, its potential influence on attitudes not assessed empirically. Building from conceptual theory’s claim that abstract ideas can be grounded simpler, conc...

In 1975, in an old abbey in Royaumont, France, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini gathered linguists, philosophers, psychologists and computationalists for the first biolinguistics get-together to discuss what the linguistics of the period told us about the structure of the mind/brain. The participants defended two contrasting viewpoints. One group, centered on Piaget's work, claimed that language mas...

Metaphors pervade discussions of critical issues and influence how people reason about these domains. For instance, when crime is a beast, people suggest enforcement-oriented approaches to crime-reduction (e.g., by augmenting the police force); when crime is a virus, on the other hand, people suggest systemic reforms for the affected community. In the current study, we find that extending metap...

In exploring large volumes of information, more often than not, one single visualization is not sufficient for grasping the whole data set. This may be due to different reasons: the screen real-estate is limited, the user’s capacity for comprehending a large data set also has limits, different views or perspectives of the same data may be needed to grasp all the details, and so on. Multiple vis...

We propose that metaphor is a mechanism by which motivational states in one conceptual domain can influence attitudes in a superficially unrelated domain. Two studies tested whether activating motives related to the self-concept influences attitudes toward social topics when the topics' metaphoric association to the motives is made salient through linguistic framing. In Study 1, heightened moti...

This paper describes a system for representing knowledge about conventional metaphors for use by natural language analysis, generation and acquisition systems. A system of hierarchically related structured associations is used. These associations are implemented as a part of the KODIAK representation language. Particular attention is paid in this paper to representational mechanisms that can ca...