IDIOMS, NON-LITERAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

Non-literal language and semantic dementia

Semantic dementia is characterized by fluent, phonologically adequate speech with various anomias and semantic paraphasias. Performance on semantic tasks is well documented in these patients, although little is known regarding performance on more complex language tasks, such as those involving non-literal language (interpretation of metaphors and proverbs and recognition of irony). OBJECTIVE ...

Inhibition of the Literal: Metaphors and Idioms as Judgmental Primes

activation have presented prime words in contexts where the meaning of each word was invariant (e.g., word puzzles). In this research, we used words in contexts that supported either literal or figurative meanings, and found that only the con text-appropriate meanings had subsequent priming effects on person-perception judgments. In Experiment 1 , participants read the word "fire" in one of thr...

Natural Language and Knowledge Representation

Non-Literal Use of “Jade”: A Study on “玉” (Yu) in Chinese Idioms

Among all common vehicles of Chinese metaphors, “jade” deserves some special attention. The concept of jade has vastly appeared in various contexts of Chinese poetry and idioms. The different references often correlate with specific jaderelated characters and tend to appear in a set of jade-X combinations that are entrenched in four-word-idioms. I believe the correlations are not arbitrary. Acc...

Non-literal Language Use and Coordination in Dialogue

Metonymies are known as ways of conceptualizing entities and situations of various sorts. For example, users of PCs usually call the icon depicting a waste paper basket 'basket'. They thus use the name of the depicted object for referring to the depicting object. We use a model airplane ("Baufix" airplane) as the paradigm case for investigating the semiotics of depictional metonymies and the ro...