Do listeners process literal and figurative speech differently? Research testing interpretation times has resulted in mixed findings. Some researchers have found that figurative language is processed more slowly than literal language (e.g. Noveck et.al 2001) whereas others have not (e.g. Glucksberg 2003, Gibbs & Tendahl 2006). This may be due to limitations of standard reaction time methodology...

In daily communication, we often use indirect speech to convey our intention. However, little is known about the brain mechanisms that underlie the comprehension of indirect speech. In this study, we conducted a functional MRI experiment using a scenario reading task to compare the neural activity induced by an indirect reply (a type of indirect speech) and a literal sentence. Participants read...

Sarcasm is generally characterized as a figure of speech that involves the substitution of a literal by a figurative meaning, which is usually the opposite of the original literal meaning. We re-frame the sarcasm detection task as a type of word sense disambiguation problem, where the sense of a word is either literal or sarcastic. We call this the Literal/Sarcastic Sense Disambiguation (LSSD) ...

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...

Many theorists take the view that literal meaning can be one of a number of factors to be weighed in reaching a legal interpretation. Still others regard literal meaning as having the potential to legally justify a particular outcome. Building on the scholarly response to HLA Hart’s famous ‘vehicles in the park’ hypothetical, this article presents a formal argument that literal meaning cannot b...

For NLP applications that require some sort of semantic interpretation it would be helpful to know what expressions exhibit an idiomatic meaning and what expressions exhibit a literal meaning. We investigate whether automatic word-alignment in existing parallel corpora facilitates the classification of candidate expressions along a continuum ranging from literal and transparent expressions to i...