From Visual Prototypes of Action to Metaphors Extending the IMAGACT Ontology of Action to Secondary Meanings

This paper describes an infrastructure that has been designed to deal with corpus-based variations that do not fall within the primary, physical variation of action verbs. We have first established three main categories of secondary variation--metaphor, metonymy and idiom--and criteria for creating types within these categories for each verb. The criteria rely heavily on the images that compose the IMAGACT ontology of action and on widely accepted processes of meaning extension in linguistics. Although figurative language is known for its amorphous, subjective nature, we have endeavoured to create a standard, justifiable process for determining figurative language types for individual verbs. We specifically highlight the benefits that IMAGACT’s representation of the primary meanings through videos brings to the understanding and annotation of secondary meanings.