To comprehend figurative utterances such as metaphor or sarcasm, a listener must both judge the literal meaning of the statement and infer the speaker's intended meaning (mentalizing; Amodio and Frith, 2006). To delineate the neural substrates of pragmatic comprehension, we conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with 20 normal adult volunteers. Participants read short stories fo...

In Roman times, Finisterre was considered the place where world ended (in Latin, it means literally “the end of world”). It is actually a cape on west coast Galicia, Spain, and no on...

This study is an attempt to make a comparative between Arabic and English regarding color idioms. It tends comparison by shedding light on similarities Color Eighteen idioms have been chosen; ten from nine Arabic. Each idiom has analyzed literally (dictionary meaning) non-literally (figurative meaning). The analysis displayed that both languages share some common connotations literal meanings f...

This visual essay in "The Photographer's Frame" explores how Americans’ love affair with road trips made a marriage of national park scenic landscapes and automobiles nearly inevitable—and has helped, literally, drive climate change.

Like Humpty Dumpty, many philosophers take pride in saying what they mean and meaning what they say. Literalism does have its virtues, like when you're drawing up a contract or programming a computer, but generally we prefer to speak loosely and leave a lot to inference. Language works far more efficiently that way. Two Kinds of Looseness It helps if you can rely on people not to take you too l...

When many cells divide, the nuclear envelope poses a problem: the spindle microtubules can't access the chromosomes. Two recent papers in Cell describe how the spindle solves this problem by literally pulling open the nucleus at the beginning of mitosis.

We explain how a small set of molecular building blocks will allow the implementation of “universally programmable intelligent matter,” that is, matter whose structure, properties, and behavior can be programmed, quite literally, at the molecular level.