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...

Two divided visual field priming experiments examined cerebral asymmetries for understanding metaphors varying in sentence constraint. Experiment 1 investigated ambiguous words (e.g., SWEET and BRIGHT) with literal and metaphoric meanings in ambiguous and unambiguous sentence contexts, while Experiment 2 involved standard metaphors (e.g., The drink you gave me was a meteor) with sententially co...

Nowadays it is usual to talk about metaphoric concepts. In the literature about metaphor there are, at least, two notions of metaphoric concepts. One of them is used to explain the meaning of the metaphoric use of language. The other is used to describe human cognition. Although it might be thought that the two notions of metaphoric concept that are involved in these explanations are the same, ...

In this study we investigate the comprehension of various kinds of anaphoric metaphors in context. We describe an experiment that manipulated the metaphoricity of simple noun + verb + ending sentences by using either a metaphoric noun or a metaphoric verb or both. Our results show that metaphoric nouns affect sentence comprehension to a greater extent than do metaphoric verbs. Thus, even though...

We show that it is possible to reliably discriminate whether a syntactic construction is meant literally or metaphorically using lexical semantic features of the words that participate in the construction. Our model is constructed using English resources, and we obtain state-of-the-art performance relative to previous work in this language. Using a model transfer approach by pivoting through a ...

This paper presents a method for interpreting metaphoric language in the context of a portable natural language interface. The method licenses metaphoric uses via coercions between incompatible ontological sorts. The machinery allows both previously-known and unexpected metaphoric uses to be correctly interpreted and evaluated with respect to the backend expert system.

English. In this work we explore the possibility of training a neural network to classify and rank idiomatic expressions under constraints of data scarcity. We discuss our results comparing them both to other unsupervised models designed to perform idiom detection and to similar supervised classifiers trained to detect metaphoric bigrams. Italiano. In questo lavoro esploriamo la possibilità di ...

Figurative language poses a serious challenge to NLP systems. The use of idiomatic and metaphoric expressions is not only extremely widespread in natural language; many figurative expressions, in particular idioms, also behave idiosyncratically. These idiosyncrasies are not restricted to a non-compositional meaning but often also extend to syntactic properties, selectional preferences etc. To d...

The aim of this study was to explore metaphors for discovering values and norms held by nurses in home-based nursing care. Ten interviews were analysed and interpreted in accordance with a metaphor analytical method. In the analysis, metaphoric linguistic expressions and two entailments emerged, grounded in the conceptual metaphor 'home-based nursing care is an endless journey', which were crea...

POWER is an ontology of political processes. It is designed for tracking politicians, political organisations and elections, both in mainstream and social media. In social media, these entities (particularly humans) are frequently named by emergent abbreviations, nonstandardized acronyms, nicknames, metaphoric expressions and neologisms. Politicians are also frequently mentioned in texts by the...