Object concepts refer to unique clusters of properties that can be selectively activated or inhibited depending on what information is currently relevant. This conceptual "stretching" enables limitless new meanings to be generated, and figurative language provides a useful framework in which to study this conceptual flexibility. Here we probe the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the c...

Using eye-tracking, we investigate on-line processing of idioms in a biasing story context by native and non-native speakers of English. The stimuli are idioms used figuratively (at the end of the day – ‘eventually’), literally (at the end of the day – ‘in the evening’), and novel phrases (at the end of the war). Native speaker results indicate a processing advantage for idioms over novel phras...

metonymy is one of the ambiguous factors in the literary eloquence. yakobson in his discussion about figurative and metaphoric poles of the language, considers figure substituting process on the vicinity basis and he takes it into account as an obvious characteristic of the prose. where as figure in literary eloquence, especially in contemporary poetry, is considered as an eloquent element beca...

Automatic detection of figurative language is a challenging task in computational linguistics. Recognising both literal and figurative meaning is not trivial for a machine and in some cases it is hard even for humans. For this reason novel and accurate systems able to recognise figurative languages are necessary. We present in this paper a novel computational model capable to detect sarcasm in ...

Résumé meaning. Offering a case study from the South African art music repertoire, the example chosen for this purpose is ‘Die Meisie’ (‘The Girl’), the first of five songs from Hubert du Plessis’s cycle Die Vrou (‘The Woman’). This text allows for an exceptionally productive exploration of the role of ideology in the figurative construction of musical meaning, uncovering contested points of di...

One of the hallmarks of human intelligence is the ability to go beyond literal meanings of utterances to infer speakers’ intended meanings, a feat that remains elusive to the most advanced artificial systems. Figurative language such as metaphor, in particular, provides a striking case where complex meanings arise that cannot be derived from the literal semantics alone. For example, My lawyer i...

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...

The goal of the current study was to identify the neural substrate of idiom comprehension using fMRI. Idioms are familiar, fixed expressions whose meaning is not dependent on the literal interpretation of the component words. We presented literally plausible idioms in a sentence forcing a figurative or a literal interpretation and contrasted them with sentences containing idioms for which no li...