On the relevance-theoretic approach outlined in this paper, linguistic metaphors are not a natural kind, and ―metaphor‖ is not a theoretically important notion in the study of verbal communication. Metaphorical interpretations are arrived at in exactly the same way as literal, loose and hyperbolic interpretations: there is no mechanism specific to metaphors, and no interesting generalisation th...

Psycholinguistic studies of metaphor processing must control their stimuli not just for word frequency but also for the frequency with which a term is used metaphorically. Thus, we consider the task of metaphor frequency estimation, which predicts how often target words will be used metaphorically. We develop metaphor classifiers which represent metaphorical domains through Latent Dirichlet All...

We present an approach and an associated computer program (ATT-Meta) which can interpret novel uses of familiar metaphors. ATT-Meta performs sophisticated reasoning with uncertainty of a kind that is required for reasoning about the content of metaphorical utterances. ATT-Meta’s handling of uncertainty is qualitative and handles potential conflicts between different lines of reasoning or argume...

PDXScholar Dissertations and Theses Dissertations and Theses Let us know how access to this document benefits you. Abstract The study of metaphor has moved from abstraction and poetics into the realms of cognitive science and cultural studies. Rather than being seen as purely figurative and secondary to literal meaning, investigation of metaphors reveals a close relationship to our processes of...

If anything is central to Cognitive Science, it is the nature of the human conceptual system. We have found that that system is fundamentally metaphorical in character. That is, it contains metaphorical as well as nonmetaphorical concepts, and the metaphorical structure is extremely rich and complex. Nonmetaphorical concepts are those that emerge directly from our experience and are defined in ...

Language may have evolved as a signal of mental fitness. However, it remains unclear what language form and topic men use to covertly signal mate quality. In this study 69 men created compliments to impress unfamiliar women they chose to either date or work with and provided hand scans to compute 2D4D ratio as a proxy for prenatal testosterone exposure and masculinity indicator. Compliments wer...

The present study analyzes the metaphorical extensions of the Chinese spatial term zhong and the English spatial term middle. It finds that The essay finds both ZHONG and MIDDLE are found to be used in the target domains of STATES, RANK and TIME, which further provides a piece of evidence that our abstract reasoning is partly structured by our spatial thinking through schematic mapping and meta...