Application of the ATT-Meta Metaphor-Understanding Approach to Selected Examples from Goatly Technical Report CSRP-01-01

This report provides a measure of relatively objective evaluation of our ATT-Meta approach to conducting some of the reasoning needed in the understanding of metaphorical utterances. The approach is partially implemented in our ATT-Meta system. The approach and system are not described in detail here. The utterances of most interest in this report are map-transcending ones: that is, ones that rest on metaphorical views (conceptual metaphors) that are familiar to the understander but transcend the views by using aspects of the source-domain that are not handled by the between-domain mappings the metaphorical views involve. The report evaluates the approach (not the implemented system) by applying it to fifteen examples. The source of our examples was a well-known 1997 book on metaphor by Andrew Goatly. We took all the examples that could strongly be claimed to be mundane, map-transcending and non-sidelined (see body of report for this last concept). The report shows that the approach successfully produces what we claim to be the main pieces of information conveyed by the examples. The report also vindicates our stance that metaphorical mappings should by default not be extended to cope with aspects of utterances that are those mappings do not deal with: rather, within-source-domain reasoning should be used to link those aspects to source-domain aspects that those mappings do deal with. Also, even though of the fifteen examples six require some degree of map-extension, the amount of extension is small and its nature is mostly strongly indicated by the wording in the examples. It requires little in the way of elaborate search for partial isomorphism between domains.