We present an annotation study on a representative dataset of literal and idiomatic uses of infinitive-verb compounds in German newspaper and journal texts. Infinitive-verb compounds form a challenge for writers of German, because spelling regulations are different for literal and idiomatic uses. Through the participation of expert lexicographers we were able to obtain a high-quality corpus res...

A growing body of developmental evidence suggests that the cognitive abilities enable expression and comprehension communicative intentions – so-called pragmatic which underlie language use understanding, develop early. However, a puzzling feature development is children's difficulties with non-literal uses (e.g., ‘I love you so much I could eat up!’). outline research program aims to provide i...

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...

In the design of user-friendly robots, human communication should be understood by system beyond mere logics and literal meaning. Robot communication-design has long ignored importance politeness rules that are ‘forgiving’ ‘suspending disbelief’ cannot handle basically metaphorical way humans their utterances. Through analysis psychological causes illogical non-literal statements, signal detect...

I wish to explore the link between interpretation ofmetaphors and generics in natural language, in support of a claim that the mechanisms and processes of interpretation for metaphors and generics are closely related through word sense modulation. Both tropes have curious truth conditions. In a strict literal sense (4.1), (4.2), (4.3), and (4.4) are false.

The goal of this paper is to define fermionic field in terms of non-orthonormal vierbeins, where fluctuations away from orthonormality are viewed as fermionic field. Furthermore, Grassmann numbers are defined in a way that makes literal sense.

Pulse-taking has been an important element of traditional Chinese medical diagnosis from the earliest times, and developments in pulse-taking have been reflected by the changing use of pulse terms. This must be adequately dealt with in translation if the clinical significance of a body of clinical literature spanning two millennia is to be preserved in transmission to the modern West. This pape...

This paper demonstrates that the polysemy of the verb grow is a result of natural extension of individual meanings connoted by its basic literal meaning and that the polysemy of grow, as such, can be disambiguated by applying simple rules of elimination to the argument structures, which are the contexts that make particular senses viable.

We study the task of automatically disambiguating word combinations such as jump the gun which are ambiguous between a literal and MWE interpretation, focusing on the utility of type-level features from an MWE lexicon for the disambiguation task. To this end we combine gold-standard idiomaticity of tokens in the OpenMWE corpus with MWE-type-level information drawn from the recently-published JD...