In a previous study, we demonstrated that listeners were highly successful in identifying the intended meaning of spoken ditropic sentences (those which may carry either a literal or an idiomatic meaning) when speakers were instructed to convey the distinction. The present communication reports on acoustic and phonetic analyses carried out with the goal of identifying cues that distinguished th...

It is generally believed that a metaphor tends to have a stronger emotional impact than a literal statement; however, there is no quantitative study establishing the extent to which this is true. Further, the mechanisms through which metaphors convey emotions are not well understood. We present the first data-driven study comparing the emotionality of metaphorical expressions with that of their...

Idiomatic utterances contribute by virtue of their aspectual class to the temporal structure of discourse – hence it is essential that theories of aspect derivation and discourse structure should encompass them. A recent claim has been made (McGinnis 2002) that the aspectual class of idiomatic expressions can be derived compositionally, by the same process as in literal language. We examine thi...

One of the most crucial texts for the futurist interpretation of prophecy concerning Israel is the vision of the prophet Ezekiel in chapters 40-48. In this text the prophet presents God’s instructions for the construction of a new Temple to be built as part of the promise of Israel’s divine restoration. The concern of the exiles, as exemplified by Daniel’s prayer, was for a literal rebuilding o...

Why do people so often use metaphorical expressions when literal paraphrases are readily available? This study focuses on a comparison of metaphorical statements involving the source domain of taste (e.g., "She looked at him sweetly") and their literal paraphrases (e.g., "She looked at him kindly"). Metaphorical and literal sentences differed only in one word and were normed for length, familia...

Since the previous studies on idiom translation mainly focus on the linguistic level, this paper mainly discusses the translation of idioms from a cognitive perspective, that is relevance theory. Three translation strategies are discussed under the framework of relevance theory: literal translation, literal translation with compensation and free translation.