The distinction between literal and figurative use is well-known embedded in ‘folk linguistics’. According to folk linguistics, uses deviate from ones. But recent work on lexical modulation polysemy shows that meaning deviation ubiquitous, even cases of use. Hence, it has been argued, the literal/figurative no value for theorising about communication. In this paper, we focus metaphor argue here...

Some Muslim thinkers have had disagreements over the use of the word “‘ishq” in religious texts since many years ago. The main claim made by those who prohibit the use of this word for the sacred associations such as God, the Prophet (s), and Imāms is that the meaning of this word is appropriate only to the material and carnal issues and so, it has not been used in religious texts and its conce...

Recapitulation of Lecture 1 Aim of semantics and pragmatics: to give us a theory of linguistic meaning. Semantics: literal non-situation specific meaning of words + the meaning of the way words are combined = the starting point from which the whole meaning of utterance is constructed. Pragmatics: the meaning the speaker intends to communicate in a particular utterance. One of the questions sema...

Title of Document: PRAGMATIC ENRICHMENT IN LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND DEVELOPMENT Shevaun N. Lewis, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Directed By: Professor Colin Phillips Department of Linguistics The goal of language comprehension for humans is not just to decode the semantic content of sentences, but rather to grasp what speakers intend to communicate. To infer speaker meaning, listeners must at minim...

Decades of lexical ambiguity research has rigorously studied effects of relative sense frequency on sense disambiguation in biased contexts, while fundamental semantic issues such as distinction of different types of ambiguities, or influences from lexical meanings’ semantic nature (e.g., literal or metaphorical) as well as these meanings’ degrees of conventionalization, have received less atte...

This paper proposes a method of identifying and aggregating literal nodes that have the same meaning in Linked Open Data (LOD) in order to facilitate cross-domain search. LOD has a graph structure in which most nodes are represented by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), and thus LOD sets are connected and searched through different domains.However, 5% of the values are literal values (strings...

Previous studies have suggested that formulaic and literal expressions are stored and processed according to differing characteristics, and that certain auditory–acoustic cues serve to distinguish formulaic from literal meanings. This study took these observations a step further by investigating listeners’ ability to discriminate between literal or idiomatic exemplars of ambiguous utterances an...

It is generally believed that a metaphor tends to have a stronger emotional impact than a literal statement; however, there is no quantitative study establishing the extent to which this is true. Further, the mechanisms through which metaphors convey emotions are not well understood. We present the first data-driven study comparing the emotionality of metaphorical expressions with that of their...