Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?Art thou more temperate?… Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines…

Shall I compare thee? Simile understanding and semantic categories

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...

Photoperiodism: Shall EYA Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?

Seasonal changes in day length are used by plants and animals to synchronize annual rhythms in reproduction, physiology, and behavior to the environment. Increasing day length during spring causes sudden changes in the mammalian reproductive system once the critical photoperiod is reached. The molecular mechanism behind this switch is now quickly being elucidated.

How shall i compare thee? Comparing the prudential value of actual and virtual friendship

It has become commonplace to hold the view that virtual surrogates for the things that are good in life are inferior to their actual, authentic counterparts, including virtual education, virtual skill-demanding activities and virtual acts of creativity. Virtual friendship has also been argued to be inferior to traditional, embodied forms of friendship. Coupled with the view that virtual friends...

"I Thou Thee, Thou Traitor": Predicting Formal vs. Informal Address in English Literature

In contrast to many languages (like Russian or French), modern English does not distinguish formal and informal (“T/V”) address overtly, for example by pronoun choice. We describe an ongoing study which investigates to what degree the T/V distinction is recoverable in English text, and with what textual features it correlates. Our findings are: (a) human raters can label English utterances as T...

Thou shall not bear false witness.