Emotions are often expressed metaphorically, and both emotion and metaphor are ways through which abstract meaning can be grounded in language. Here we investigate specifically whether motion-related verbs when used metaphorically are differentially sensitive to a preceding emotional context, as compared to when they are used in a literal manner. Participants read stories that ended with ambigu...

Children encounter metaphor in all aspects of their daily lives, including the spoken and written discourse of school, and metaphor can be one of the routes through which socio-cultural norms are appropriated. The use of metaphor seems to be a basic human skill, which develops in interaction with developing world knowledge and linguistic skills. Both use of metaphor and the development of metap...

In order for a person to comprehend metaphoric expressions, do metaphor-irrelevant aspects of literal information need to be inhibited? Previous research using sentence-verification paradigms has found that literal associates take longer to process after reading metaphorical sentences; however, it is problematic to infer inhibition from this research. Moreover, previous work has not distinguish...

Metaphor is ubiquitous in text, even in highly technical text. Correct inference about textual entailment requires computers to distinguish the literal and metaphorical senses of a word. Past work has treated this problem as a classical word sense disambiguation task. In this paper, we take a new approach, based on research in cognitive linguistics that views metaphor as a method for transferri...

The present paper evaluates the claim that abstract conceptual domains are structured through metaphorical mappings from domains grounded directly in experience. In particular, the paper asks whether the abstract domain of time gets its relational structure from the more concrete domain of space. Relational similarities between space and time are outlined along with several explanations of how ...

Depending on context, we use the word “nature” to refer to many different sorts of things; living animals as well as non-biological matter may be relevant. For some people, e.g., in poetry and in the New-Age movement,1 nature is a living being with omnipotent qualities, e.g., the character of being a living totality with rationality. For others, nature is more tied to everyday life; biologists ...

moving in line with the postulation that metadiscourse (md) markers help transform a dry and tortuous piece of text into a coherent and reader-friendly one, the researchers in the current study attempted to investigate the effect different metadiscourse markers might have on iranian efl learners’ perception of written texts. to this end, 120 undergraduate english students were given three diffe...

metadiscourse is a widely used term in current discourse analysis and language education, referring to an interesting, and relatively new approach to conceptualizing interaction between text producers and their texts and between text producers and users. despite the growing importance of the term, however, it is often understood in different ways and used to refer to different aspects of langua...

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neurobehavioral disorder characterized by various behavioral and cognitive difficulties. Previous studies indicated that children with ADHD have language difficulties, including difficulties in metaphor understanding but the relation between metaphor processing and specific cognitive functions needs further investigation. In the curren...

Previous studies have found that bodily stimulation, such as hardness biases social judgment and evaluation via metaphorical association; however, it remains unclear whether bodily stimulation also affects cognitive functions, such as memory and creativity. The current study used metaphorical associations between "hard" and "rigid" and between "soft" and "flexible" in Chinese, to investigate wh...