The paper presents first results of an ongoing project on text simplification focusing on linguistic metaphors. Based on an analysis of a parallel corpus of news text professionally simplified for different grade levels, we identify six types of simplification choices falling into two broad categories: preserving metaphors or dropping them. An annotation study on almost 300 source sentences wit...

It's become a caricature of autistic persons that they don't understand figurative language. Despite empirical evidence to the contrary, three of the four contributions to this special issue endorse this stereotype without question. And all four contributions attribute this supposed deficit to even shakier fallacies, such as the controversial claim that autistic people lack empathy or a 'theory...

According to Gibbs (2006) “there is still insufficient attention paid to the exact ways that cultural beliefs shape both people’s understandings of their embodied experiences and the conceptual metaphors which arise from these experiences.” For example, the conceptual metaphor EMOTIONS ARE FLUIDS WITHIN THE BODY seems to underlie a wide variety of metaphorical expressions used by speakers from ...

Abstract From the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, governments, health agencies, public institutions and media around world have made use metaphors to talk about virus, its effects measures needed reduce spread. Dominant among these been war (e.g. battles, front lines, combat ), which present virus as an enemy that needs be fought beaten. These attracted unprecedented amount criticism from diver...

processing skills and children's idiom comprehension 2 Abstract Two experiments compared 7-to 8-and 9-to 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and inference from context to understand idioms. We used a multiple-choice task and manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, familiar or novel, and presented with or without a supportive story context. Performance was compared ...