This study examined how emergent features, which are made salient in the interpretation of metaphor, are related to metaphor appreciation. According to an incongruity resolution model of poetic appreciation, the role of emergent features in metaphor appreciation is predicted to facilitate poetic appreciation by constituting a richer interpretation when topic–vehicle similarity is lower. Two exp...

Metaphor is much more than a pyrotechnical flourish of language or a fascinating conceptual puzzle: it is a cognitive lever that allows speakers to leverage their knowledge of one domain to describe, reframe and understand another. Though NLP researchers tend to view metaphor as a problem to be solved, metaphor is perhaps more fittingly seen as a solution to be used, that is, as an important to...

Two fundamental (and oftentimes opposing) metaphors have directed much of HCI design: HCI is communication and HCI is direct manipulation. Beneath these HCI metaphors, however, is the unspoken metaphor of computer is woman. In this paper we expose this foundational metaphor. We begin by identifying the origin of computer is woman in the early history of computing. Drawing upon postmodern femini...

Simile is widely viewed as a less sophisticated conceptual device than metaphor, not least because similes are explicitly marked and are frequently more obvious about the meanings they carry. Nonetheless, this lack of sophistication makes simile an ideal basis for acquiring the category-specific knowledge required to understand metaphor. In this paper we describe a computational approach to sim...

Automatic metaphor identification and interpretation in text have been traditionally considered as two separate tasks in natural language processing (NLP) and addressed individually within computational frameworks. However, cognitive evidence suggests that humans are likely to perform these two tasks simultaneously, as part of a holistic metaphor comprehension process. We present a novel method...

The problem of iconicity has been a recurring theme in linguistic inquiry into the nature of the linguistic sign. The property of iconicity includes not only the narrow category of sound symbolism, but also the broad categories of isomorphism and metaphor. This paper surveys recent research, and offers a classification of diagrammatic and metaphorical iconicity in language. Problems of structur...

For the last decade a new metaphor has been progressively, but securely, penetrating the domains of academic and professional psychology. The “narrative” metaphor began to be widely diffused in books, journal articles, and conference papers. Even though some ancient roots of the narrative metaphor can be traced back (c.f., Polkinghorne, 1988), we are indebted to Theodore Sarbin (1986) for intro...

This paper provides an analysis of a public service advertising in terms of a metaphor: A SEAT BELT IS A FAMILY, a variant of the metaphor A CAR IS A LIVING ROOM. The analysis shows how aspects of metaphors and metonymies surface in various modes and how metaphor and metonymy interaction fulfils different cognitive and persuasive roles in a multimodal genre. This paper proposes that two domains...

The relationship between metaphor and the practice of utilization in therapy and hypnosis can be seen as dependent on metaphor's role in structuring experience. The work of Gregory Bateson and others is used to illustrate how metaphor functions. Bateson's comparison of two forms of syllogistic logic provides a background for distinguishing between the experiential effects of metaphor in contras...