Introduction Figurative comparisons consisting of two nouns (a target and a base) can be expressed in two grammatical forms, i.e., in simile form (X is like Y), or in metaphor form (X is Y). Recently, many studies have shown that there are substantial differences between metaphors and similes. In particular, much evidence has been found for people’s grammatical preference for figurative compari...

We investigate the effectiveness of semantic generalizations/classifications for capturing the regularities of the behavior of verbs in terms of their metaphoricity. Starting from orthographic word unigrams, we experiment with various ways of defining semantic classes for verbs (grammatical, resource-based, distributional) and measure the effectiveness of these classes for classifying all verbs...

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...

This paper proposes an unsupervised approach that automatically detects and corrects a text containing multiple errors of both syntactic and semantic nature. The number of errors that can be corrected is equal to the number of correct words in the text. Error types include, but are not limited to: spelling errors, real-word spelling errors, typographical errors, unwanted words, missing words, p...

The notion of a “thematic role” has been an important one in linguistic theories concerning the syntax/semantics interface (Fillmore, 1968), but their effects on high-level cognition remain relatively unexplored. Thematic roles,like AGENT and PATIENT, are said to be linked with specific grammatical positions like that of “subject” and “direct object”. Here we ask if the link between grammatical...