Although the field of natural language processing has made considerable strides in the automated processing of standard language, figurative (i.e., non-literal) language still causes great difficulty. Normally, when we understand human language we combine the meaning of individual words into larger units in a compositional manner. However, understanding figurative language often involves an int...

This paper describes an infrastructure that has been designed to deal with corpus-based variations that do not fall within the primary, physical variation of action verbs. We have first established three main categories of secondary variation--metaphor, metonymy and idiom--and criteria for creating types within these categories for each verb. The criteria rely heavily on the images that compose...

Russian language acquisition requires deep and intensive studying of the concept of verbs of motion. There is a strong opinion that verbs of motion are one of the hardest concepts in the Russian language. However, it is an important issue, as motion verbs are among the most used in any language and nowadays there are hundreds of expressions with these verbs which can be heard quite frequently i...

The role of literal meaning during the construction of meaning that goes beyond pure literal composition was investigated by combining cross-modal masked priming and ERPs. This experimental design was chosen to compare two conflicting theoretical positions on this topic. The indirect access account claims that literal aspects are processed first, and additional meaning components are computed o...

ART DEFINITION FIGURATIVE ART Almost all art is abstract art, if we take abstraction to be a process of drawing inspiration from the shape, color and texture of objects. Artists have "abstracted" from the world around them since prehistoric times. But it was not until the early twentieth century that abstraction began to be explored as an end in itself. Abstract art tends to rely on the associa...

In studies of the cognitive processing of idioms, the role of mental imagery in understanding idioms remains a controversial issue. Cacciari and Glucksberg (1995) conducted an experimental study to investigate whether generating mental images of idioms can facilitate their comprehension. Their results appeared to reject both the possible connection between the literal mental image of an idiom a...

The aim of the present paper is to provide an insight into the issue of idiom comprehension in patients who are in the process of recovery from the syndrome of aphasia. Research in figurative language comprehension has seen a robust development in the recent decades. However, it has not been until quite recently that psycholinguists began to delve into the aspect of metaphorical language compre...

We challenge the commonly held view that the interpretation of metonymies should proceed from a literal-meaning-first approach and argue for an equally balanced treatment of literal and figurative language use. Resulting ambiguities are handled by a combination of two techniques. First, we incorporate discourse constraints into metonymy resolution, reflecting the systematic interaction patterns...