In this paper, we argue that the metaphor form of a comparison (i.e., a topic-vehicle pair) is preferred over, and more comprehensible than, the simile form when the interpretive diversity for that comparison is high. Interpretive diversity refers to the richness of the figurative meaning of a comparison; it is high to the extent that more features or properties are related to the figurative me...

IRELAND Please address all correspondence (re paper and requests for reprints) to Tony Veale at the above address. Abstract Once viewed as a rhetorical and superficial language phenomenon, metaphor is now recognized to serve a fundamental role in our conceptual structuring and language comprehension processes. In particular, it is argued that certain experiential metaphors based upon intuitions...

Unstructured interviews and open ended questions allow investigators to learn from experts without first being experts themselves. Structured surveys demand that researchers understand the theory, model and measures of all the variables of interest before interviewing the respondent. Unstructured interviews allow for a rich amount of information to be collected, but in a form that is very hard ...

This study examined how emergent features, which are made salient in the interpretation of metaphor, are related to metaphor appreciation. According to an incongruity resolution model of poetic appreciation, the role of emergent features in metaphor appreciation is predicted to facilitate poetic appreciation by constituting a richer interpretation when topic–vehicle similarity is lower. Two exp...

Metaphor is much more than a pyrotechnical flourish of language or a fascinating conceptual puzzle: it is a cognitive lever that allows speakers to leverage their knowledge of one domain to describe, reframe and understand another. Though NLP researchers tend to view metaphor as a problem to be solved, metaphor is perhaps more fittingly seen as a solution to be used, that is, as an important to...

Two fundamental (and oftentimes opposing) metaphors have directed much of HCI design: HCI is communication and HCI is direct manipulation. Beneath these HCI metaphors, however, is the unspoken metaphor of computer is woman. In this paper we expose this foundational metaphor. We begin by identifying the origin of computer is woman in the early history of computing. Drawing upon postmodern femini...

Simile is widely viewed as a less sophisticated conceptual device than metaphor, not least because similes are explicitly marked and are frequently more obvious about the meanings they carry. Nonetheless, this lack of sophistication makes simile an ideal basis for acquiring the category-specific knowledge required to understand metaphor. In this paper we describe a computational approach to sim...

Automatic metaphor identification and interpretation in text have been traditionally considered as two separate tasks in natural language processing (NLP) and addressed individually within computational frameworks. However, cognitive evidence suggests that humans are likely to perform these two tasks simultaneously, as part of a holistic metaphor comprehension process. We present a novel method...

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...

For the last decade a new metaphor has been progressively, but securely, penetrating the domains of academic and professional psychology. The “narrative” metaphor began to be widely diffused in books, journal articles, and conference papers. Even though some ancient roots of the narrative metaphor can be traced back (c.f., Polkinghorne, 1988), we are indebted to Theodore Sarbin (1986) for intro...