The Metaphorical Brain Long considered a peripheral topic in linguistics, metaphor is increasingly viewed as a central feature of higher cognition and abstract thought. Investigation of the neural substrate of metaphor has, similarly, become more sophisticated, involving increasingly specific suggestions about the processes involved in its comprehension. This Frontiers Research Topic brings tog...

Languages often use spatial terms to talk about time. FRONT-BACK spatial terms are the terms most often imported from SPACE to TIME cross-linguistically . However, in English there are two different metaphorical mapping systems assigning FRONT BACK to events in time. This research examines the psychological reality of the two mapping systems: specifically, we ask whether subjects construct glob...

Identifying metaphorical language-use (e.g., sweet child) is one of the challenges facing natural language processing. This paper describes three novel algorithms for automatic metaphor identification. The algorithms are variations of the same core algorithm. We evaluate the algorithms on two corpora of Reuters and the New York Times articles. The paper presents the most comprehensive study of ...

This paper presents the ideas and mapping strategies behind a performance system that uses a combination of motion tracking and feature extraction tools to manage complex multichannel audio materials for real-time music composition. The use of embodied metaphors within these mappings is seen as a means of managing the complexity of a musical performance across multiple modalities. In particular...

While the ubiquity and importance of nonliteral language are clear, people’s ability to use and understand it remains a mystery. Metaphor in particular has been studied extensively across many disciplines in cognitive science. One approach focuses on the pragmatic principles that listeners utilize to infer meaning from metaphorical utterances. While this approach has generated a number of insig...

An experiment was carried out to test the thesis that people employ sensory-motor conceptual metaphors to understand metaphorical expressions. Congenitally blind and sighted participants paraphrased metaphorical expressions derived from the UNDERSTANDING is GRASPING and UNDERSTANDING is SEEING conceptual metaphors, and evaluated to what extent they felt they had understood them. On the one hand...