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...

Some of the arguments for the use of role playing as a substitute for traditional experimental methods are examined. The premises on which such arguments are based are found to be more controversial than the technique itself. Role playing as a research tool is not categorically rejected; however, it is argued that its use may be theoretically justified in relation to a certain research problem ...

The size of everyday data sets is outpacing the capability of computational hardware to analyze these data sets. Social networking and mobile computing alone are producing data sets that are growing by terabytes every day. Because these data often cannot be loaded into a computer’s working memory, most literal algorithms (algorithms that require access to the full data set) cannot be used. One ...

Despite its undeniable currency in research and policy circles, there remains considerable confusion about what 'population health' is. We propose a lexicon for population health in the hope of clarifying issues and advancing this important research emphasis and policy agenda. It distinguishes population health in its literal meaning from a population health perspective, population health resea...

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...