Notes on Sanskrit Similes

Similes on the Internet have explanations.

We searched the Internet for expressions linking topics, such as crime, and vehicles, such as disease, as similes (crime is like a disease) and as metaphors (crime is a disease). We counted the number of times the expressions were accompanied by explanations (crime is like a disease because it spreads by direct personal influence). Similes were more likely than metaphors to be accompanied by ex...

Are metaphors elliptical similes?

What is the relation between metaphors and similes? Aristotle's "comparison theory" holds that metaphors are elliptical similes: "Sam is a pig" is simply a short form of "Sam is like a pig." In contrast, it has been suggested that metaphors cannot be elliptical similes because metaphors are "stronger" than similes. We know metaphors are stronger, it is argued, because of examples involving corr...

Similes and Sets

This paper is a report on an analysis of the English preposition like. I investigated the 101,096 occurrences of this preposition in the British National Corpus (BNC). What is its normal role and function? It seems that like has a central role to play in cognition, more powerful than metaphor and going far beyond mere comparison of similarities. It is a truism that like introduces similes (e.g....

Annotating Similes in Literary Texts

Annotated corpora are invaluable resources for researchers in the humanities: on the one hand, for natural processing tasks, they can serve as standards against which results from new automatic methods can be measured; on the other hand, in corpus-based studies, they enable either to answer existing research questions or to explore original ones. In this respect, some annotation frameworks such...

Sanskrit Segmentation