Neither arbitrary horses, nor intentional lions, nor generic unicorns are animals, and would-be assistents do not have to be assistents.2 In fact, one may well wonder just what sort of objects the paraphrases in (0') are supposed to be about. Given their dubious ontological status, an analysis of (0) that can do without them ought to be preferrable to one along the lines of (0') – ceteris parib...

Hitherto, theories of similarity have restricted themselves to judgments of what might be called literal similarity. A central thesis of this article is that a complete account of similarity needs also to be sensitive to nonliteralness, or metaphoricity, an aspect of similarity statements that is most evident in similes but that actually underlies metaphorical language in general. Theoretical a...

Based on psychological studies which show that metaphors and other nonliteral constructions are comprehended in the same amount of time as comparable literal constructions, some researchers have concluded that literal meaning is not computed during metaphor comprehension. In this paper, we suggest that the empirical evidence does not rule out the possibility that literal meaning is constructed....

The notion of literal meaning was once so unproblematic that it would easily fit Arnauld’s description: it was one of those notions that are “so clear that they cannot be explained through others, because there are none which are clearer and simpler than them.” But in our century, its fate has not been different from that of so many other notions previously presumed to be “fundamental ,” and it...

The correct identification of metonymies is not normally a problem for most people. For computers, things are different, however. In Natural Language Processing, metonymy recognition is therefore usually addressed with complex algorithms that rely on hundreds of labelled training examples. This paper investigates two approaches to metonymy recognition that dispense with this complexity, albeit ...

Hashimoto, Chikara and Kawahara, Daisuke. 2008. Drawing a Line between Literal and Idiomatic Meanings Based on Supervised WSD. Linguistic Research 25(2), 105-123. Some phrases can be interpreted either idiomatically (figuratively) or literally in context, and the precise identification of idioms is indispensable for full-fledged natural language processing (NLP). To this end, we have constructe...

The construction of a figurative interpretation for a string like Some surgeons are butchers (Gildea & Glucks-berg, 1983) has been traditionally viewed as subordinate to the construction of a literal interpretation. What Cacciari and Glucksberg (1994) refer to as the standard view of figurative processing—a view that largely stems from Searle (1979) and Grice (1975)—contends that a figurative i...