The goal of the current study was to identify the neural substrate of idiom comprehension using fMRI. Idioms are familiar, fixed expressions whose meaning is not dependent on the literal interpretation of the component words. We presented literally plausible idioms in a sentence forcing a figurative or a literal interpretation and contrasted them with sentences containing idioms for which no li...

The role of sensory-motor components in language processing is a central topic in cognitive neuroscience. Recent studies showed that the processing of action words recruits cortical motor regions involved in the planning and execution of the described actions. However, it remains unclear to what extent the abstract versus concrete nature of the described motion modulates the activation of premo...

The idea that the conceptual system draws on sensory and motor systems has received considerable experimental support in recent years. Whether the tight coupling between sensory-motor and conceptual systems is modulated by factors such as context or task demands is a matter of controversy. Here, we tested the context sensitivity of this coupling by using action verbs in three different types of...

poetic analysis involves the explication of a poem by focusing on the process of semiosis in it. through semiosis linguistic meaning is transformed into stylistic meaning. an examination of semiosis brings us to look at the hypersemanticized poetic structures which are none other than the style features of a poem. since style functions in a literary text by conveying meanings other than literal...

This paper presents a token-based automatic classification of German perception verbs into literal vs. multiple non-literal senses. Based on a corpus-based dataset of German perception verbs and their systematic meaning shifts, we identify one verb of each of the four perception classes optical, acoustic, olfactory, haptic, and use Decision Trees relying on syntactic and semantic corpus-based f...

To investigate the real time processing of metaphoric adjectives, we measured participants looking behavior as they listened to sentences such as The little boy was shocked as a result of the [electrical socket/report card] in the context of a display with four images. Displays included two Unrelated pictures, a Literal picture consistent with the literal interpretation of the adjective (an ele...

proverb is one of the most beautiful rhetorical arts which makes delivering discourse close to the target and stabilizes meaning for the addressee. it has some features such as word briefness, suitable meaning,nice similie,fast circulation,ability to bring noticeable points closer to the reasonable ones and its acceptance by the public opinion. for this reason,this kind of innovative rhetorical...

Idiom translation is a challenging problem in machine translation because the meaning of idioms is non-compositional, and a literal translation is likely to be wrong. In this paper, we assess the quality of idiom translation of a modern neural MT system. We introduce a new evaluation method based on an idiom-specific blacklist of literal translations, based on the insight that the occurrence of...

Idioms are sometimes viewed as unitized phrases with interpretations that are independent of the literal meanings of their individual words. In three experiments, the nature of idiom representation was explored with a speech-error elicitation task. In the task, speakers briefly viewed paired idioms. After a short delay they were probed to produce one of the two idioms, and their production late...