Cognitive linguists suggest that understanding metaphors requires activation of conceptual mappings between the involved concepts. We tested whether mappings are indeed in use during metaphor comprehension, and what mapping means as a cognitive process with Event-Related Potentials. Participants read literal, conventional metaphorical, novel metaphorical, and anomalous target sentences preceded...

aptness, defined as how the vehicle is well able to cover the salient features of the tenor (e.g., oil is like liquid gold vs. a train is like a worm), is claimed to be an important factor in the preference for metaphors over similes, or vice versa. this study was an attempt to test for the supposed correlation between the perceived degree of aptness and a priori stylistic preference for metaph...

The present study is focused on the automatic identification and description of frozen similes in British and French novels written between the 19 century and the beginning of the 20 century. Two main patterns of frozen similes were considered: adjectival ground + simile marker + nominal vehicle (e.g. happy as a lark) and eventuality + simile marker + nominal vehicle (e.g. sleep like a top). Al...

Metaphor and simile research has traditionally focused on the projection of content from vehicle to topic, thereby revealing new meaning in the topic. We show that the meaning of vehicles also changes during figurative language understanding. Participants read a poem that likens the temporal self to a snake being divided by a machete, and were asked to draw the snake. Against prototypical snake...