The time courses for constructing literal and figurative interpretations of simple propositions were measured with the response signal, speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure. No differences were found in comprehension speed for literal and figurative strings in a task that required judging whether a string of words was meaningful. Likewise, no differences were found in processing speed for nonsense...

This study investigates whether understanding up/down metaphors as well as semantically homologous literal sentences activates embodied representations online. Participants read orientational literal sentences (e.g., she climbed up the hill), metaphors (e.g., she climbed up in the company), and abstract sentences with similar meaning to the metaphors (e.g., she succeeded in the company). In Exp...

The traditional theory of irony, which assumes that an ironist uses a figurative meaning opposite to the literal meaning of the utterance, is shown to be inadequate; an alternative theory is presented, which assumes that the ironist mentions the literal meaning of the utterance and expresses an attitude toward it. Although the implications for understanding irony are difficult to test, the two ...

Automatic processing of metaphor can be clearly divided into two subtasks: metaphor recognition (distinguishing between literal and metaphorical language in a text) and metaphor interpretation (identifying the intended literal meaning of a metaphorical expression). Both of them have been repeatedly addressed in NLP. This paper is the first comprehensive and systematic review of the existing com...

Lack of reference in the Holy Qur'an to the verses that Allah intended to be taken either literally or allegorically has left the door open for some sectarian interpreters to deliberately ignore the Qur'anic literal meaning and opt only for the allegorical meanings, with a view of distorting the underlying significance of this great book. This paper does not intend to show that the literal mean...

The traditional notion of word meaning used in natural language processing is literal or lexical meaning as used in dictionaries and lexicons. This relatively objective notion of lexical meaning is different from more subjective notions of emotive or affective meaning. Our aim is to come to grips with subjective aspects of meaning expressed in written texts, such as the attitudes or value expre...

A fundamental question in psycholinguistic theory is whether equivalent success in sentence comprehension may come about by different underlying operations. Of special interest is whether adult aging, especially when accompanied by reduced hearing acuity, may shift the balance of reliance on formal syntax vs. plausibility in determining sentence meaning. In two experiments participants were ask...