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.

We consider the threshold for the solvability of random k-SAT formulas (for k ≥ 3) using the pure literal rule. We demonstrate how this threshold can be found by using differential equations to determine the appropriate limiting behavior of the pure literal rule.

There exist various approaches in SAT solvers that aim at extending inference based on unit propagation. For instance, probing [5] simply applies unit propagation of literals at the root node in order to detect failed literals [3] or to populate literal implication lists. The latter information can then, for instance, be used to shrink clauses by hidden literal elimination (e.g., if a → b then ...

The role of literal meaning during the construction of meaning that goes beyond pure literal composition was investigated by combining cross-modal masked priming and ERPs. This experimental design was chosen to compare two conflicting theoretical positions on this topic. The indirect access account claims that literal aspects are processed first, and additional meaning components are computed o...

The role of sensory-motor components in language processing is a central topic in cognitive neuroscience. Recent studies showed that the processing of action words recruits cortical motor regions involved in the planning and execution of the described actions. However, it remains unclear to what extent the abstract versus concrete nature of the described motion modulates the activation of premo...

In this study, we investigated the neural substrate involved in the comprehension of novel metaphoric sentences by comparing the findings to those obtained with literal and anomalous sentences using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Stimuli consisted of 63 copula sentences ("An A is a B") in Japanese with metaphorical, literal, or anomalous meanings. Thirteen normal pa...

Literal meaning has been defined as linguistic meaning, i.e., as nonfigurative, coded, fully compositional, context-invariant, explicit, and truth conditional (Katz, Jerrold J., 1977. Propositional structure and illocutionary force. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell). Nonliteral meaning is seen as its counterpart, i.e., as extralinguistic, figurative, indirect, inferred, noncompositional, context-dep...

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...