Simile is widely viewed as a less sophisticated conceptual device than metaphor, not least because similes are explicitly marked and are frequently more obvious about the meanings they carry. Nonetheless, this lack of sophistication makes simile an ideal basis for acquiring the category-specific knowledge required to understand metaphor. In this paper we describe a computational approach to sim...

A simile is a figure of speech comparing two fundamentally different things. Sometimes, a simile will explain the basis of a comparison by explicitly mentioning a shared property. For example, “my room is as cold as Antarctica” gives “cold” as the property shared by the room and Antarctica. But most similes do not give an explicit property (e.g., “my room feels like Antarctica”) leaving the rea...

Since Aristotle, people have believed that metaphors and similes express the same type of figurative meaning, despite the fact that they are expressed with different sentence patterns. In contrast, recent psycholinguistic models have suggested that metaphors and similes may promote different comprehension processes. In this study, we investigated the neural substrates involved in the comprehens...

This paper puts forward the mapping inheritance hypothesis which states that the ultimate goal of mapping is to inherit the attributes of source domains by comparing structures ‘as A as Y’(像 Y 一样 A)and 'n n/n+n'. Furthermore, we have built a knowledge base for simile and explored the distribution of source domain and its attribute hierarchy. The study shows that the number of S domain words in ...

Reproduction of Criconernoides simile, Paratylenchus projectus, and Helicotylenchus pseudorobustus, alone and in certain combinations, was characterized during 50 days on the soybean cultivars Custer and Hood. Custer was the more suitable host for all three nematodes and C. simile was the most vigorous parasite on both cultivars. C. simile and H. pseudorobustus reproduced as well in combination...

Our study investigates the process of topic comprehension in comparative sentences and the relationship between this process and the word order of topic and vehicle. Our experiment used a meaningfulness decision task with three conditions: no-vehicle sentence (e.g. a word hurts someone), vehicle-after-topic sentence (e.g. a word, like a weapon, hurts someone), and vehicle-before-topic sentence ...

Similes are figures of speech in which the similarities as well as the differences between two or more semantically unrelated entities are expressed by means of a linguistic unit. This unit, also called marker, can either be a morpheme, a word or a phrase. Since similes rely on comparison, they occur in several languages of the world. Depending on the marker used and of the semantic or structur...

Shepard’s notion of “internalisation” is better interpreted as a simile than a metaphor. A fractal encoding model of visual perception is sketched, in which image elements are transformed in such a way as to maximise symmetry with the current input. This view, in which the transforming system embodies what has been internalised, resolves some problems raised by the metaphoric interpretation.

The purpose of this article is to present a few research findings on the process of understanding simile, where special attention was given to the semantic relationship between its three major components: Tenor (hereafter T), Vehicle (hereafter V) and Predicate (hereafter P). By manipulating different degrees of conventionality among these three components and the explicit presence of a P, eigh...