Despite flourishing research on the relationship between emotion and literal language, and despite the pervasiveness of figurative expressions in communication, the role of figurative language in conveying affect has been underinvestigated. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 619 German idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between affective and psycholin...

Separation methods used in organic chemistry are briefly reviewed, emphasis being placed on aspects that are frequently ignored, and special attention being paid to the analytical applications of separation. The relevance of physical, inorganic and analytical chemistry for organic chemistry is stressed. The term 'separation' can be used in analytical chemistry in both a literal and figurative s...

The goal of the current study was to identify the neural substrate of idiom comprehension using fMRI. Idioms are familiar, fixed expressions whose meaning is not dependent on the literal interpretation of the component words. We presented literally plausible idioms in a sentence forcing a figurative or a literal interpretation and contrasted them with sentences containing idioms for which no li...

City Portraits and Caricatures Introduction Cities are a very rich source of data in order to understand how people organize themselves on different scales. The discourse on the visualization of cities offered different approaches, from more abstract to illustrative and figurative ones. In this chapter, we approach the visualization of cities in a less abstract, puristic way. Distancing ourselv...

We start with a rectangular grid of points, and we connect pairs of points to form either a tour (a Hamiltonian cycle) or a braid (a collection of disjoint paths that start in the top row and end on the bottom). In each case, our goal is to design a graph that will closely resemble a grayscale target image when viewed from a distance. From up close, the graph will look like an abstract pattern....

The relevance of the study is caused by the continuing interest of linguists to the problem of phraseology as a special – national – sign in the language system, reflecting the national-cultural features of the perception of the world, national mentality, ideological and mental attitudes of native speakers. The analysis of scientific literature showed that the phraseological layer reflecting th...

Do we view the world differently if it is described to us in figurative rather than literal terms? An answer to this question would reveal something about both the conceptual representation of figurative language and the scope of top-down influences on scene perception. Previous work has shown that participants will look longer at a path region of a picture when it is described with a type of f...

The following review critically synthesizes the literature on hemispheric differences in idiom and metaphor comprehension. It has long been debated whether figurative language is inherently different from literal language and is processed specifically in the right hemisphere (RH), or rather, whether figurative and literal language form a continuum rather than a dichotomy, and call upon a simila...

Although the field of natural language processing has made considerable strides in the automated processing of standard language, figurative (i.e., non-literal) language still causes great difficulty. Normally, when we understand human language we combine the meaning of individual words into larger units in a compositional manner. However, understanding figurative language often involves an int...