Metaphor enters contemporary philosophical discussion from a variety of directions. Aside from its obvious importance in poetics, rhetoric, and aesthetics, it also figures in such fields as philosophy of mind (e.g., the question of the metaphorical status of ordinary mental concepts), philosophy of science (e.g, the comparison of metaphors and explanatory models), in epistemology (e.g., analogi...

processing skills and children's idiom comprehension 2 Abstract Two experiments compared 7-to 8-and 9-to 10-year-olds' ability to use semantic analysis and inference from context to understand idioms. We used a multiple-choice task and manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, familiar or novel, and presented with or without a supportive story context. Performance was compared ...

In this article, we examine the relationship between literal and figurative meanings in view of mental spaces and conceptual blending theory as developed by Fauconnier & Turner (2002). Beginning with a brief introduction to the theory, we proceed by analyzing examples of metaphor, fictive motion, and virtual change to reveal various processes of meaning construction at work in a range of exampl...

This report summarizes the objectives and evaluation of the SemEval 2015 task on the sentiment analysis of figurative language on Twitter (Task 11). This is the first sentiment analysis task wholly dedicated to analyzing figurative language on Twitter. Specifically, three broad classes of figurative language are considered: irony, sarcasm and metaphor. Gold standard sets of 8000 training tweets...

This paper describes the system used by the ValenTo team in the Task 11, Sentiment Analysis of Figurative Language in Twitter, at SemEval 2015. Our system used a regression model and additional external resources to assign polarity values. A distinctive feature of our approach is that we used not only wordsentiment lexicons providing polarity annotations, but also novel resources for dealing wi...

The following review critically synthesizes the literature on hemispheric differences in idiom and metaphor comprehension. It has long been debated whether figurative language is inherently different from literal language and is processed specifically in the right hemisphere (RH), or rather, whether figurative and literal language form a continuum rather than a dichotomy, and call upon a simila...