On the relevance-theoretic approach outlined in this paper, linguistic metaphors are not a natural kind, and ―metaphor‖ is not a theoretically important notion in the study of verbal communication. Metaphorical interpretations are arrived at in exactly the same way as literal, loose and hyperbolic interpretations: there is no mechanism specific to metaphors, and no interesting generalisation th...

We present an annotation study on a representative dataset of literal and idiomatic uses of infinitive-verb compounds in German newspaper and journal texts. Infinitive-verb compounds form a challenge for writers of German, because spelling regulations are different for literal and idiomatic uses. Through the participation of expert lexicographers we were able to obtain a high-quality corpus res...

In this article, we examine the relationship between literal and figurative meanings in view of mental spaces and conceptual blending theory as developed by Fauconnier & Turner (2002). Beginning with a brief introduction to the theory, we proceed by analyzing examples of metaphor, fictive motion, and virtual change to reveal various processes of meaning construction at work in a range of exampl...

We describe an error in earlier probabilistic analyses of the pure literal heuristic as a procedure for solving k-SAT. All probabilistic analyses are in the constant degree model in which a random instance C of k-SAT consists of m clauses selected independently and uniformly (with replacement) from the set of all k-clauses over n variables. We provide a new analysis for k = 2. Speciically, we s...

On input a random 3-CNF formula of clauses-to-variables ratio r3 applies repeatedly the following simple heuristic: Set to True a literal that appears in the maximum number of clauses, irrespective of their size and the number of occurrences of the negation of the literal (ties are broken randomly; 1-clauses when they appear get priority). We prove that for r3 < 3.42 this heuristic succeedswith...

"Ditropically" ambiguous sentences (each having both a literal and an idiomatic interpretation) were prepared tbr listener's discrimination judgments, and fbr silent readers' rankings on an "idiomaticity'" scale. Listeners were unable to discriminate the literal from the idiomatic versions when presented with randomized single sentences excised from paragraph contexts. There was a bias toward i...

Metaphor comprehension involves an interaction between the meaning of the topic and the vehicle terms of the metaphor. Meaning is represented by vectors in a high-dimensional semantic space. Predication modifies the topic vector by merging it with selected features of the vehicle vector. The resulting metaphor vector can be evaluated by comparing it with known landmarks in the semantic space. T...