this study was an effort towards examining the relationship between iranian efl learners’ language proficiency and their metaphorical competence. the were 120 iranian efl learners studying at sadr english language center within the 19-25 age range. the efl learners’ english proficiency from elementary to advanced which was determined by the opt. afterwards, the students were administered a rese...

recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance and the ubiquity of metaphors in language. their effect has been instrumental in making significant headway into the pedagogical practice and design of teaching materials. the current study was carried out to explore the efficacy of focus-on-form (fonf) and focus-on-forms (fonfs) instructions on learning metaphorical l...

On the relevance-theoretic approach outlined in this paper, linguistic metaphors are not a natural kind, and ―metaphor‖ is not a theoretically important notion in the study of verbal communication. Metaphorical interpretations are arrived at in exactly the same way as literal, loose and hyperbolic interpretations: there is no mechanism specific to metaphors, and no interesting generalisation th...

Psycholinguistic studies of metaphor processing must control their stimuli not just for word frequency but also for the frequency with which a term is used metaphorically. Thus, we consider the task of metaphor frequency estimation, which predicts how often target words will be used metaphorically. We develop metaphor classifiers which represent metaphorical domains through Latent Dirichlet All...

We present an approach and an associated computer program (ATT-Meta) which can interpret novel uses of familiar metaphors. ATT-Meta performs sophisticated reasoning with uncertainty of a kind that is required for reasoning about the content of metaphorical utterances. ATT-Meta’s handling of uncertainty is qualitative and handles potential conflicts between different lines of reasoning or argume...