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...

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...

We report on interoperability of different sentiment lexica with each other and with the linguistic notions negation and modality for sentiment analysis of tweets in a comprehensive ablation study and in competition results for SemEval 2015. Our approach performed well at the tweet level, but excelled in the presence of figurative language.

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...

Idiom comprehension of 15 patients with mild probable Alzheimer's disease was examined by means of a sentence-to-picture matching task. Patients had to choose between two pictures, one representing the figurative and the other the literal interpretation. They were also submitted to a literal sentence comprehension test and to a pencil-and-paper dual task. Whereas literal comprehension was norma...

We propose a formal criterion for delineating literal from figurative speech (metonymies, metaphors, etc.). It is centered around the notion of categorization conflicts that follow from the context of the utterance. In addition, we consider the problem of granularity, which is posed by the dependence of our approach on the underlying ontology, and compare our distinction with alternative refere...

This paper is an artist statement describing a manipulation of the Mandelbrot Set equation as the basis for creating semi-figurative images, using a genetic algorithm. Modernist painting is referenced in terms of the play between representation and abstraction. The Platonic implications of the Mandelbrot Set are considered as a point of departure for manipulation of the complex function.