This paper aims at demonstrating that the cognitive mechanisms underlying certain tropes (e.g. metaphor or metonymy) may assume variable degrees of conventionalisation, thereby giving rise to a range of phenomena along either side of the semantics/ pragmatics distinction. Examining specifically cases of metonymy, I propose a pragmatic account of creative, one-off metonymic expressions using the...

Patients suffering from schizophrenia have been found to be impaired in their pragmatic abilities in the comprehension of figurative language (e.g., metaphors, ironies, proverbs). Impairments in theory of mind (ToM; that is, the ability to attribute/infer mental states) have been proposed to be underlying high level language understanding. Even though ToM has been shown to be defective in schiz...

We present a Gaussian Mixture model for detecting different types of figurative language in context. We show that this model performs well when the parameters are estimated in an unsupervised fashion using EM. Performance can be improved further by estimating the parameters from a small annotated data set.

This pilot study explores a new approach to automatic detection of figurative language. Our working hypothesis is that the problem of automatic identification of idioms (and metaphors, to some extent) can be reduced to the problem of identifying an outlier in a dataset. By an outlier we mean an observation which appears to be inconsistent with the remainder of a set of data.

in recent decades, “figurative language” has gained the interest of a large number of russian linguists as a source of lexical enrichment. persian and russian manifest, are more or less, a different image of a movement. nevertheless, these verbs share a number of linguistic features, although they belong to two diverse languages. due to the high frequency in the function of movement verbs in th...

activation have presented prime words in contexts where the meaning of each word was invariant (e.g., word puzzles). In this research, we used words in contexts that supported either literal or figurative meanings, and found that only the con text-appropriate meanings had subsequent priming effects on person-perception judgments. In Experiment 1 , participants read the word "fire" in one of thr...

In the study of collocations and of frozen sentences (idioms, clichés, collocations, many metaphors and figurative meanings, etc.) one often encounters sets of similar forms that cannot be related by formal rules of either type: phrase structure or transformational. We present examples of such situations and we show how the formalism of finite automata can be used to represent them in a natural...

Aesthetic studies are engaged with various visual stimuli connected to human senses, which project different perceptions based on one’s aesthetic experiences. The right output of the process is a ‘symptom’ ‘delighted’ art creates positive experiences in measuring ‘good taste’ art. This paper’s aim was review ARS instrument domains namely textile, writing, painting, figurative, abstract represen...

Face-to-face dialogue is the basic site of language use. Our group’s program of research focuses on unique features of face-to-face dialogue, especially the ways in which participants collaborate moment-by-moment (e.g. Bavelas et al., 1995; Bavelas and Chovil, 1997; Bavelas et al., 2000, 2002). Current experiments are showing that the availability of collaborative processes in dialogue signific...

This paper outlines a corpus-based method for the analysis of metonymic expressions based on a series of quantitative and qualitative analyses. While an intuitive approach to metonymy successfully identifies lexical items which have metonymic extensions, intuition alone cannot settle the question how these extensions map onto linguistic form. Consider the expression set all hearts on fire, whic...