The Metaphorical Brain Long considered a peripheral topic in linguistics, metaphor is increasingly viewed as a central feature of higher cognition and abstract thought. Investigation of the neural substrate of metaphor has, similarly, become more sophisticated, involving increasingly specific suggestions about the processes involved in its comprehension. This Frontiers Research Topic brings tog...

Why do people so often use metaphorical expressions when literal paraphrases are readily available? This study focuses on a comparison of metaphorical statements involving the source domain of taste (e.g., "She looked at him sweetly") and their literal paraphrases (e.g., "She looked at him kindly"). Metaphorical and literal sentences differed only in one word and were normed for length, familia...

Metaphors in idioms are universal in languages. The progression from conceptual meaning to metaphorical meaning is a cognitive activity of mapping from one thing to another. This paper, based on the analysis of 2,347 metaphorical idioms, their linguistic features, grammatical structures, grammatical functions, and semantic categories, tries to identify categories of metaphorical idioms. Most of...

One way that languages are able to communicate a potentially infinite set of ideas through a finite lexicon is by compressing emerging meanings into words, such that over time, individual words come to express multiple, related senses of meaning. We propose that overarching communicative and cognitive pressures have created systematic directionality in how new metaphorical senses have developed...

Metaphorical effects are commonly assumed to be unidirectional, running from concrete to abstract domains but not vice versa. Noting that metaphorical effects are often found to be bidirectional, we explore how they may be mediated and moderated according to the principles of knowledge accessibility and applicability. Using the example of “something smells fishy” (a metaphorical expression of s...

The objective of this paper is to present a new dimension of Game Theoretic Semantics (GTS) using the idea of the coordination problem game to explain the semantics of metaphor. A metaphorical expression1 such as ‘man is a wolf’ is a contradictory statement that insists all objects in the set of ‘man’ also falls under ‘wolf’. The study of metaphorical expression should be on intentions of such ...

It is widely accepted that, in the course of interpreting a metaphorical utterance, both literal and metaphorical interpretations of the utterance are available to the interpreter, although there may be disagreement about the order in which these interpretations are accessed. I call this the dual availability assumption. I argue that it does not apply in cases of metaphorical singular reference...

We demonstrate in two experiments that real and imagined body movements appropriate to metaphorical phrases facilitate people's immediate comprehension of these phrases. Participants first learned to make different body movements given specific cues. In two reading time studies, people were faster to understand a metaphorical phrase, such as push the argument, when they had previously just made...

by YOUNGSHIM BAEK (Under the Direction of Jooyoung Kim) ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to investigate the persuasive effects of metaphors in print advertising on consumer attitudes toward advertisements and brands, under different product condition that vary in the level of involvement (high vs. low) and the basic consumption type of product (utilitarian vs. hedonic). The results suggest...

Experimental studies on polysemy have come to contradictory conclusions on whether words with multiple senses are stored as separate or shared mental representations. The present study examined the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity of literal and non-literal (metonymic and metaphorical) senses of three word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two methods were used: a psycholinguis...