grammaticalization provides a framework to study the genesis and development of grammatical forms in language. in this framework, it is argued that new grammatical forms are constantly developed from lexical items and the already formed grammatical items may go out of use. in spite of some counterexamples, this is often seen as a unidirectional and cyclic process. in this article the concepts o...

We used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to assess whether reading literal, non-literal (i.e., metaphorical, idiomatic) and fictive motion sentences modulates the activity of the motor system. Sentences were divided into three segments visually presented one at a time: the noun phrase, the verb and the final part of the sentence. Single pulse-TMS was delivered at the end of the sentence ...

The principles of atonal pitch organization are still in large part unknown. The reason why they are unknown is also unknown. The present paper addresses this methodological problem. The paper first examines roles of metaphor in the theory of tonal accentual patterns and examines the way we handle music-theoretical issues with metaphor. Metaphorical expressions are used to classify and designat...

While the ubiquity and importance of nonliteral language are clear, people’s ability to use and understand it remains a mystery. Metaphor in particular has been studied extensively across many disciplines in cognitive science. One approach focuses on the pragmatic principles that listeners utilize to infer meaning from metaphorical utterances. While this approach has generated a number of insig...

Emergence of creative ideas often involves sudden linking of unrelated ideas. Here we demonstrate that the production of insights about novel metaphor was preceded by prolonged visual inspection of metaphorical sentences. The participants made free spoken responses in a task requiring the generation of semantic interpretations about visually presented sentences, where gaze locations were contin...

inferences as metaphorical spatial inferences Spatial inferences are characterized by the topological structure of image-schemas. We have seen cases such as CATEGORIES ARE CONTAINERS and LINEAR SCALES ARE PATHS where image-schema structure is preserved by metaphor and where abstract inferences about categories and linear scales are metaphorical versions of spatial inferences about containers an...

Languages often use spatial terms to talk about time. FRONT-BACK spatial terms are the terms most often imported from SPACE to TIME cross-linguistically . However, in English there are two different metaphorical mapping systems assigning FRONT BACK to events in time. This research examines the psychological reality of the two mapping systems: specifically, we ask whether subjects construct glob...

People speak metaphorically about abstract concepts-for instance, a person can be "full of love" or "have a lot of love to give." Over the past decade, research has begun to focus on how metaphors are processed during language comprehension. Much of this work suggests that understanding a metaphorical expression involves activating brain and body systems involved in perception and motor control...