The present study examined the role of the left (LH) and right (RH) cerebral hemispheres in processing alternative meanings of idiomatic sentences. We conducted two experiments using ambiguous idioms with plausible literal interpretations as stimuli. In the first experiment we tested hemispheric differences in accessing either the literal or the idiomatic meaning of idioms for targets presented...

In automatic speech recognition (ASR) enabled applications for medical dictations, corpora of literal transcriptions of speech are critical for training both speaker independent and speaker adapted acoustic models. Obtaining these transcriptions is both costly and time consuming. Non-literal transcriptions, on the other hand, are easy to obtain because they are generated in the normal course of...

Multiword expressions can have both idiomatic and literal occurrences. Distinguishing these two cases is considered one of the major challenges in MWE processing. We suggest that literal readings should be considered in both semantic and syntactic terms, which motivates their study in a treebank. We propose heuristics to automatically pre-identify candidate sentences that might contain literal ...

This study investigated whether verbs in figurative language activate different types of associations than do verbs in literal language. In a sentence-priming experiment, we compared sentences featuring verbs in idiomatic phrases with control sentences in which the same verbs were meant literally. Participants made lexical decisions about nouns that were associated with either the verb’s litera...

Hitherto, theories of similarity have restricted themselves to judgments of what might be called literal similarity. A central thesis of this article is that a complete account of similarity needs also to be sensitive to nonliteralness, or metaphoricity, an aspect of similarity statements that is most evident in similes but that actually underlies metaphorical language in general. Theoretical a...

Based on psychological studies which show that metaphors and other nonliteral constructions are comprehended in the same amount of time as comparable literal constructions, some researchers have concluded that literal meaning is not computed during metaphor comprehension. In this paper, we suggest that the empirical evidence does not rule out the possibility that literal meaning is constructed....

The notion of literal meaning was once so unproblematic that it would easily fit Arnauld’s description: it was one of those notions that are “so clear that they cannot be explained through others, because there are none which are clearer and simpler than them.” But in our century, its fate has not been different from that of so many other notions previously presumed to be “fundamental ,” and it...