Metaphorical effects are commonly assumed to be unidirectional, running from concrete to abstract domains but not vice versa. Noting that metaphorical effects are often found to be bidirectional, we explore how they may be mediated and moderated according to the principles of knowledge accessibility and applicability. Using the example of "something smells fishy" (a metaphorical expression of s...

People's innate neurological perceptions, mental simulations, intuitions, and schemas provide the familiar source entities, relationships, and actions for a metaphor. People metaphorically project this information on to the target problem to construct new concepts, relationships and actions. People also reason metaphorically to: connect mathematical ideas, improve recall, understand mathematica...

This article addresses the learnability of auditory icons, that is, environmental sounds that refer either directly or indirectly to meaningful events. Direct relations use the sound made by the target event whereas indirect relations substitute a surrogate for the target. Across 3 experiments, different indirect relations (ecological, in which target and surrogate coexist in the world; metapho...

Metaphor is ubiquitous in text, even in highly technical text. Correct inference about textual entailment requires computers to distinguish the literal and metaphorical senses of a word. Past work has treated this problem as a classical word sense disambiguation task. In this paper, we take a new approach, based on research in cognitive linguistics that views metaphor as a method for transferri...

Why do people so often use metaphorical expressions when literal paraphrases are readily available? This study focuses on a comparison of metaphorical statements involving the source domain of taste (e.g., "She looked at him sweetly") and their literal paraphrases (e.g., "She looked at him kindly"). Metaphorical and literal sentences differed only in one word and were normed for length, familia...

Metaphors in idioms are universal in languages. The progression from conceptual meaning to metaphorical meaning is a cognitive activity of mapping from one thing to another. This paper, based on the analysis of 2,347 metaphorical idioms, their linguistic features, grammatical structures, grammatical functions, and semantic categories, tries to identify categories of metaphorical idioms. Most of...

With the exponential growth of Internet technology, the notion of users’ cognition when navigating such a vast information space has gained prominence. Studies suggest that metaphors can serve as effective tools to scaffold users’ mental modeling processes. However, how users conceive of the metaphorical aid (as opposed to simply how they perceive it) remains questionable. Cognitive style, or t...

Metaphorical effects are commonly assumed to be unidirectional, running from concrete to abstract domains but not vice versa. Noting that metaphorical effects are often found to be bidirectional, we explore how they may be mediated and moderated according to the principles of knowledge accessibility and applicability. Using the example of “something smells fishy” (a metaphorical expression of s...

The objective of this paper is to present a new dimension of Game Theoretic Semantics (GTS) using the idea of the coordination problem game to explain the semantics of metaphor. A metaphorical expression1 such as ‘man is a wolf’ is a contradictory statement that insists all objects in the set of ‘man’ also falls under ‘wolf’. The study of metaphorical expression should be on intentions of such ...