aptness, defined as how the vehicle is well able to cover the salient features of the tenor (e.g., oil is like liquid gold vs. a train is like a worm), is claimed to be an important factor in the preference for metaphors over similes, or vice versa. this study was an attempt to test for the supposed correlation between the perceived degree of aptness and a priori stylistic preference for metaph...

Composite Interface Metaphors 2 Two experiments describe how a composite metaphor interface (CMI) for performing website tasks can be developed using an iterative and theory-based design approach. The CMI consisted of two semantically unrelated metaphors: the library metaphor and the travel metaphor. A new componential model for predicting the effectiveness of CMIs is described and used for der...

Metaphors are extremely pervasive in language. They provide a powerful manner of making abstract concepts explicit. For these reasons, they are frequently utilized to describe emotional state. The current research supports the idea that metaphors used in emotional domains tend to be conventionalized. This conventionalization is what makes it possible to identify common themes in the metaphors r...

This paper surveys some of the important trends of the research on metaphor comprehension in the cognitive science area. We examine the semantic theories of the metaphor, some pros and (mostly) cons of the very challenged error-recovery model of metaphor comprehension. We present Lakoo's view that metaphors are conceptual rather than linguistic phenomena; we discuss how theories of other tropes...

The comprehension of metaphors involves the ability to activate a broader, more flexible set of semantic associations in order to integrate the meanings of the weakly related parts of the metaphor into a meaningful linguistic expression. Previous findings point to a relation between levels of creativity and efficiency in processing metaphoric expressions, as measured by reaction times (RTs) and...

English uses the horizontal spatial metaphors to express time (e.g., the good days ahead of us). Chinese also uses the vertical metaphors (e.g., 'the month above' to mean last month). Do Chinese speakers, then, think about time in a different way than English speakers? Boroditsky [Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought? Mandarin and English speakers' conceptions of time. Cognitive P...