This study investigated the cognitive and linguistic factors presumed to be associated with adult comprehension of figurative language, including age, working memory (WM), figurative language type, and reading comprehension (RC). Forty younger (M = 22 years) and 40 older (M = 63 years) healthy African American adults completed WM and reading tasks, and the 60-item forced-choice multiple-categor...

Using a corpus-based approach, this paper analyzes figurative language through observing the Chinese five elements (五 行 ) of 金 ‘metal,’ 木 ‘wood,’ 水 ‘water,’ 火 ‘fire’ and 土 ‘earth.’ This work found that there are at least two types of figurative language in Mandarin Chinese – one of which occurs at the morphosyntactic level and the other occurs during the mappings between two domains (between th...

Figurative language such as irony, sarcasm, and metaphor is considered a significant challenge in sentiment analysis. These figurative devices can sculpt the affect of an utterance and test the limits of sentiment analysis of supposedly literal texts. We explore the effect of figurative language on sentiment analysis. We incorporate the figurative language indicators into the sentiment analysis...

Based on twelve in-depth interviews at a battered women’s support center in Colima, Mexico in 1996, the following paper is an analysis of the figurative language used by battered women at different points of group therapy. This research compares the type of metaphors and similes used by participants at the beginning of the therapeutic process with those used by participants at the end of the sa...

This paper outlines a corpus-based method for the analysis of metonymic expressions based on a series of quantitative and qualitative analyses. While an intuitive approach to metonymy successfully identifies lexical items which have metonymic extensions, intuition alone cannot settle the question how these extensions map onto linguistic form. Consider the expression set all hearts on fire, whic...

The meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be transparently worked out from the meanings of its constituent words due to its figurative and unpredictable nature. Consequently, the syntactic composition and the structural paradigm of an idiomatic expression are supposed to be the same in every context. However, this is not the case in the institutionalized second language varieties of English...

The DsUniPi team participated in the SemEval 2015 Task#11: Sentiment Analysis of Figurative Language in Twitter. The proposed approach employs syntactical and morphological features, which indicate sentiment polarity in both figurative and non-figurative tweets. These features were combined with others that indicate presence of figurative language in order to predict a fine-grained sentiment sc...

the purpose of the present paper is to investigate semantic deviation of the holy quran in amal donqol's poetry. deviation is one of the techniques of defamiliarization, and was first introduced by the russian formalists in 1917. constructivist attitude toward literary texts and emphasis on the aesthetic aspects of the literary works led formalists to consider literary language as the main...

Figurative language represents one of the most difficult tasks regarding natural language processing. Unlike literal language, figurative language takes advantage of linguistic devices such as irony, humor, sarcasm, metaphor, analogy, and so on, in order to communicate indirect meanings which, usually, are not interpretable by simply decoding syntactic or semantic information. Rather, figurativ...

This paper proposes a technique to create figurative relationships using Mikolov et al.’s word vectors. Drawing on existing work on figurative language, we start with a pair of words and use the intersection of word vector similarity sets to blend the distinct semantic spaces of the two words. We conduct preliminary quantitative and qualitative observations to compare the use of this novel inte...