Dimensions of Metaphorical Meaning

Recent work suggests that concreteness and imageability play an important role in the meanings of figurative expressions. We investigate this idea in several ways. First, we try to define more precisely the context within which a figurative expression may occur, by parsing a corpus annotated for metaphor. Next, we add both concreteness and imageability as “features” to the parsed metaphor corpus, by marking up words in this corpus using a psycholinguistic database of scores for concreteness and imageability. Finally, we carry out detailed statistical analyses of the augmented version of the original metaphor corpus, cross-matching the features of concreteness and imageability with others in the corpus such as parts of speech and dependency relations, in order to investigate in detail the use of such features in predicting whether a given expression is metaphorical or not

An inferential articulation of metaphorical assertions

This paper argues for the view that metaphors are assertions by locating metaphor within our social discursive practices of asserting and inferring. The literal and the metaphorical differ not in the stating of facts nor in the representation of states of affairs but in the kind of inferential involvements they have and the normative score-keeping practices within which the inferential connections are articulated. This inferentialist based account of metaphor is supplemented by insights from accommodation theory. The account is significant for our understanding of both metaphor‟s figurativeness and cognitive content

Metaphor. The good argument in science communication

The relation between metaphor and argumentation in science communication is becoming a crucial tool for critical metaphor studies. In this article, by means of a crossed analysis (epistemological, cognitive and linguistic), I focus especially on a peculiar dynamic of metaphor use in scientific communication showing opposite, paradoxical attitudes towards the use of metaphors, respectively, ubiquity vs. invisibility, inclination vs. resistance, deliberate vs. non-deliberate. In this way, an overall philosophical reflection about the underlying reasons for the ambivalence in the use of metaphor in scientific communication would be proposed and discussed

The effect of cultural background on metaphor interpretation

This article describes a study that investigated the ways in which Bangladeshi students interpreted metaphors used by their lecturers during a short course at a British university. The students were asked to interpret a number of metaphors presented in context. They were also asked to identify the value judgements that were being expressed through these metaphors in these particular contexts. Culture-specific assumptions about the target domains appeared to affect the students’ recognition of the lecturers’ attitudes to the issues they were discussing. In order to identify areas of disparity between the (working) cultures of the Bangladeshi students and their British lecturers, Hofstede’s (1980) cultural values questionnaire was administered. The students were found to be more likely than their lecturers to favour uncertainty avoidance, and to favour high power distance at work. The kinds of (mis)interpretations that the students made of (the evaluative content of) the metaphors appeared in accordance with these cultural differences. Implications of these findings are discussed

The communicative effectiveness of different types of communication strategy

This study examines compensation strategies (techniques for dealing with knowledge gaps between learner and interlocutor), relates them to synoptic and ectenic learning (Ehrman and Leaver, 2002, 2003), and suggests reasons for the fact that ectenic learners, who need conscious control of what they are learning, seemed to communicate meanings of words to judges better than the synoptics, who feel freer to rely on their intuition and pre-conscious processing, but also tend to use more novel and therefore less readily comprehensible figures of speech. The subjects were French learners of English

A Human Information Behavior Approach to a Philosophy of Information

This paper outlines the relation between philosophy of information (PI) and human information behavior (HIB). In this paper, we first briefly outline the basic constructs and approaches of PI and HIB. We argue that a strong relation exists between PI and HIB, as both are exploring the concept of information and premise information as a fundamental concept basic to human existence. We then exemplify that a heuristic approach to PI integrates the HIB view of information as a cognitive human- initiated process by presenting a specific cognitive architecture for information initiation based on modular notion from HIB/evolutionary psychology and the vacuum mechanism from PI.published or submitted for publicatio

Wine and metaphor: cross-cultural [dis]harmony

When influential Australian wine judge and critic James Halliday describes an Australian 2008 Shiraz as 'an undoubtedly full-bodied wine, with a peacock's tail display of blackberry fruit, dark chocolate and vanillin oak, and with impeccable balance and line, the finish subtle' (Dan Murphy's, 2011, October, p. 7) he endeavours to capture its essence in prose. The use of such expressive and evocative language is intended to conjure visual, emotive and synaesthetic perceptions from his audience. This chapter explores the bond between metaphorical language and wine discourse in the specialised genre of wine tasting notes

Metaphor Aptness And Conventionality: A Processing Fluency Account

Conventionality and aptness are two dimensions of metaphorical sentences thought to play an important role in determining how quick and easy it is to process a metaphor. Conventionality reflects the familiarity of a metaphor whereas aptness reflects the degree to which a metaphor vehicle captures important features of a metaphor topic. In recent years it has become clear that operationalizing these two constructs is not as simple as asking naïve raters for subjective judgments. It has been found that ratings of aptness and conventionality are highly correlated, which has led some researchers to pursue alternative methods for measuring the constructs. Here, in four experiments, we explore the underlying reasons for the high correlation in ratings of aptness and conventionality, and question the construct validity of various methods for measuring the two dimensions. We find that manipulating the processing fluency of a metaphorical sentence by means of familiarization to similar senses of the metaphor (“in vivo conventionalization”) influences ratings of the sentence\u27s aptness. This misattribution may help explain why subjective ratings of aptness and conventionality are highly correlated. In addition, we find other reasons to question the construct validity of conventionality and aptness measures: for instance, we find that conventionality is context dependent and thus not attributable to a metaphor vehicle alone, and we find that ratings of aptness take more into account than they should