Generic Demonstratives

Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues in Sociolinguistics/Social Issues in Historical Linguistics (1995

press). The career of metaphor. Psychological Review

The Career of Metaphor A central question in metaphor research is how metaphors establish mappings between concepts from different domains. We propose an account of metaphoric mappings based on structure-mapping theory. We then describe an evolutionary path in figurative language comprehension- the career of metaphor- in which there is a shift in mode of mapping from comparison to categorization as metaphors are conventionalized. Across three experiments, we show that conventional figurative statements differ from novel figurative statements in two important ways. At the representational level, conventional figurative statements differ in that they have stored metaphorical abstractions as alternate representations. At the processing level, whereas novel figurative statements are processed as comparisons, conventional figuratives can be processed either as comparison or as categorizations. The career of metaphor hypothesis offers a unified theoretical framework that can resolvee the current debate between comparison and categorization models of metaphor. Our account further suggests that whether metaphors are processed directly or indirectly, and whether they operate at the level of individual concepts or entire conceptual domains, will depend both on their degree of conventionality and on their grammatical form

The coherence imbalance hypothesis : A functional approach to asymmetry in comparison

Directional asymmetry is a well-documented phenomenon in research on similarity, metaphor, and analogy. In. this paper, we present an account of this phenomenon based on structural alignment. We propose that a major source of asymmetry is coherence imbalance: that is, a difference in the degree of systematicity of the relational structures being compared. These claims are tested in three experiments which examine the relationship between asymmetry, informativity, and conceptual coherence. The results support the hypothesis that coherence imbalance is a key factor in directional comparison processes. Further, by incorporating the insights offered by structural alignment, coherence imbalance advances a more functional account of asymmetry

Metaphor comprehension: From comparison to categorization

In this paper, we explore the relationship between metaphor and polysemy. We begin by discussing how novel metaphoric mappings can create new word meanings in the form of domain-general representations. Turning next to consider the implications of this view for the on-line comprehension of figurative language, we suggest that there is a shift from comparison processing to categorization processing as metaphors are conventionalized. Finally, we describe a series of experimental findings that support the proposed account