We investigate how people process negation in semantically distorted and metaphoric sentences. We present three experiments in which participants judged the truth of affirmative and negative sentences that were either literal or contained semantic illusions (Erickson & Mattson, 1981) or metaphors. In all experiments, negation increases processing times; although for semantic illusions, negation...

The first word of the Hebrew text of Genesis "תישארב" as traditionally vocalized means literally "In a beginning." However, tradition gives it the meaning and translation "In the beginning." The literal meaning is considered as contradicting reality. Therefore, Rashi suggested a syntactic solution that maintains the traditional meaning. However, this syntactic solution, as is shown later, requi...

On the relevance-theoretic approach outlined in this paper, linguistic metaphors are not a natural kind, and ―metaphor‖ is not a theoretically important notion in the study of verbal communication. Metaphorical interpretations are arrived at in exactly the same way as literal, loose and hyperbolic interpretations: there is no mechanism specific to metaphors, and no interesting generalisation th...

We present an annotation study on a representative dataset of literal and idiomatic uses of infinitive-verb compounds in German newspaper and journal texts. Infinitive-verb compounds form a challenge for writers of German, because spelling regulations are different for literal and idiomatic uses. Through the participation of expert lexicographers we were able to obtain a high-quality corpus res...

Humans interact with each other seamlessly, smoothly, and without obvious effort. Social signals are the basis of this highly effective communication. These signals are speech utterances, body movements such as gestures, manipulations of objects, and combinations thereof. For example, interlocutors typically position themselves in an F-formation (Goffman, 1963; Ciolek and Kendon, 1980; Kendon, ...

In this article, we examine the relationship between literal and figurative meanings in view of mental spaces and conceptual blending theory as developed by Fauconnier & Turner (2002). Beginning with a brief introduction to the theory, we proceed by analyzing examples of metaphor, fictive motion, and virtual change to reveal various processes of meaning construction at work in a range of exampl...

We describe an error in earlier probabilistic analyses of the pure literal heuristic as a procedure for solving k-SAT. All probabilistic analyses are in the constant degree model in which a random instance C of k-SAT consists of m clauses selected independently and uniformly (with replacement) from the set of all k-clauses over n variables. We provide a new analysis for k = 2. Speciically, we s...

On input a random 3-CNF formula of clauses-to-variables ratio r3 applies repeatedly the following simple heuristic: Set to True a literal that appears in the maximum number of clauses, irrespective of their size and the number of occurrences of the negation of the literal (ties are broken randomly; 1-clauses when they appear get priority). We prove that for r3 < 3.42 this heuristic succeedswith...