Metaphor production and metaphor interpretation

The distinction between ‘deliberate’ and ‘non deliberate’ metaphors has been developed within a five-step framework (Steen) of metaphor production. Deliberate metaphors invite the addressee to pay special attention to their cross-domain structure mapping rather than focusing primarily on the topical proposition. This paper presents results of a pilot survey eliciting interpretations for the metaphors a nation is a body/a nation is a person from an international sample of respondents in 10 different countries. ESL/EFL users from diverse cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds were asked to apply the metaphorical idiom body politic to their home nations. The responses show systematic variation in preferred metaphor interpretations, some of which can be linked to dominant cultural traditions, as well as evidence of polemical and/or ironic elaboration. Neither of these findings is predicted by classic conceptualist models that describe metaphor understanding as an automatic and unconscious process. Instead, when paying special attention to metaphoricity, informants seem to have chosen between diverse interpretation versions and in some cases to have elaborated them further to achieve social pragmatic effects. These findings provide new supporting evidence for Deliberate Metaphor Theory by highlighting deliberateness in metaphor interpretation and outlining perspectives for further empirical testing of metaphor understanding in specific registers and usage contexts (e.g., political discourse, EFL/ESL acquisition).

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Metaphor Production by Patients with Schizophrenia – A Case Analysis

Metaphor and Symbol ◽

10.1080/10926488.2021.1893606 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 36 (3) ◽

pp. 119-140

Author(s):

Kristina Š. Despot ◽

M. Sekulić Sović ◽

M. Vilibić ◽

N. Mimica

Keyword(s):

Case Analysis ◽

Metaphor Production

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When Figurative Language Goes off the Rails and under the Bus: Fluid Intelligence, Openness to Experience, and the Production of Poor Metaphors

Journal of Intelligence ◽

10.3390/jintelligence9010002 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 2

Author(s):

Paul J. Silvia ◽

Roger E. Beaty

Keyword(s):

Figurative Language ◽

Fluid Intelligence ◽

Complex Form ◽

Semantic Distance ◽

Openness To Experience ◽

Creative Thought ◽

Basic Task ◽

Task Requirements ◽

Dead Metaphor ◽

Metaphor Production

The present research examined the varieties of poor metaphors to gain insight into the cognitive processes involved in generating creative ones. Drawing upon data from two published studies as well as a new sample, adults’ open-ended responses to different metaphor prompts were categorized. Poor metaphors fell into two broad clusters. Non-metaphors—responses that failed to meet the basic task requirements—consisted of “adjective slips” (describing the topic adjectivally instead of figuratively), “wayward attributes” (attributing the wrong property to the topic), and “off-topic idioms” (describing the wrong topic). Bad metaphors—real metaphors that were unanimously judged as uncreative—consisted of “exemplary exemplars” (vehicles that lacked semantic distance and thus seemed trite) and “retrieved clichés” (pulling a dead metaphor from memory). Overall, people higher in fluid intelligence (Gf) were more likely to generate a real metaphor, and their metaphor was less likely to be a bad one. People higher in Openness to Experience, in contrast, were more likely to generate real metaphors but not more or less likely to generate bad ones. Scraping the bottom of the response barrel suggests that creative metaphor production is a particularly complex form of creative thought.

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Evaluación Multidimensional de la Superdotación: Criterios de validez de la Batería de Inteligencia y Creatividad para predecirlos talentos artísticos y académicos

Anales de Psicología ◽

10.6018/analesps.32.3.259391 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 32 (3) ◽

pp. 628 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Tatiana De Cassia Nakano ◽

Ricardo Primi ◽

Walquiria De Jesus Ribeiro ◽

Leandro S. Almeida

Keyword(s):

Children And Adolescents ◽

Divergent Thinking ◽

Fluid Intelligence ◽

Gifted Students ◽

Latent Factors ◽

Reasoning Abilities ◽

Verbal Creativity ◽

Metaphor Production ◽

Figural Fluency ◽

Regular Students

We test the utility of the Battery for Giftedness Assessment (BaAH/S) in identifying differences in two groups of already known gifted students in the areas of academic and artistic talents. Four latent factors were assessed (a) fluid intelligence, (b) metaphor production (verbal creativity), (c) figural fluency (figural creativity), and (d) divergent thinking figural task quality (figural creativity). A sample of 987 children and adolescents, 464 boys and 523 girls, of ages ranging from 8 to 17 of two groups: regular students (N=866) and gifted students (N= 67 academic abilities, N=34 artistic abilities and N=20 no domain identified). Academic giftedness group of have higher reasoning, can produce more remote/original metaphors, high figural fluency and drawings rated as more original. Children in the group of artistic giftedness have higher reasoning, high figural fluency and drawings rated as more original. Reasoning abilities are relatively higher in academic giftedness group than artistic (r = .39 vs r =.14). Within artistic group figural fluency and ratings of originality are relatively more important than reasoning (r = .25 and r = .21 vs .14). We emphasizes the importance of assessing creativity in different domains in addition to intelligence to improve the understanding of giftedness and talent.

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Discourse Goals Affect the Process and Product of Nominal Metaphor Production

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research ◽

10.1007/s10936-014-9305-7 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 44 (5) ◽

pp. 555-569 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Akira Utsumi ◽

Maki Sakamoto

Keyword(s):

Metaphor Production

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A response to the paper “Metaphor interpretation and motivation in relevance theory” by Huaxin Huang and Xiaolong Yang

Journal of Pragmatics ◽

10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.004 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 60 ◽

pp. 274-278 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Istvan Kecskes

Keyword(s):

Relevance Theory ◽

Metaphor Interpretation

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Thinking out of the box

Internet Pragmatics ◽

10.1075/ip.00049.hee ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 64-94

Author(s):

Romy A. M. van den Heerik ◽

Ellen Droog ◽

Melanie Jong Tjien Fa ◽

Christian Burgers

Keyword(s):

Social Media ◽

Creative Process ◽

Different Types ◽

Internet Environment ◽

Metaphor Production ◽

The Creation

Abstract Metaphor production is a creative process of thinking out of the box, which can be of great communicative value to language users. In this study, we explored how metaphor production can be stimulated by different types of cues in an internet environment. Participants (N = 318) were invited to co-create a metaphorical campaign slogan in a social media setting with randomly selected sets of real campaign slogans. We measured how linguistic (metaphor markers) and social media cues (likes) prompt direct metaphor. Results show that the metaphor marker ‘so’ stimulated metaphor production. Likes for previously posted metaphorical slogans did not affect the creation of a metaphor. We found a correlation between the actual and self-perceived creativity of the co-created slogans. Besides, the co-created metaphors both echoed and deviated from previously posted campaign slogans, leading to different degrees of creativity. Co-creation in a social media setting seems a fruitful environment for metaphor production.

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Interpretation of metaphors in Chinese poetry: Where did Li Bai place his emotions?

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities ◽

10.1093/llc/fqaa016 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Ciyuan Peng ◽

Jason J Jung

Keyword(s):

Statistical Approach ◽

Target Object ◽

Chinese Poetry ◽

Emotional Understanding ◽

Sentiment Detection ◽

Li Bai ◽

Metaphor Interpretation ◽

Negative Sentiment ◽

Metaphorical Interpretation ◽

Emotion Mining

Abstract Recently, with an increasing number of metaphor studies being conducted, research on metaphor interpretation has set off an upsurge. Although a multitude of studies on the interpretation of metaphors exists, many are limited to the understanding of literal meanings without attempting an interpretation of hidden emotions in metaphorical expressions. There are particularly few studies on metaphorical emotions interpretation in literary studies with rich and implicit emotions, such as classical Chinese poetry. This study proposes the interpretation of the metaphorical emotions of special objects in Chinese poetry based on emotion distribution. We present a statistical approach to calculate the emotion distribution of our target objects by exploiting contextual emotion mining. According to the emotion distribution, the emotion with the highest probability is considered the metaphorical emotion of the target object. Subsequently, the metaphorical emotion can be determined as a positive or negative sentiment based on expert annotations. Using the proposed method, we have tested two representative objects, ‘月’ (moon) and ‘风’ (wind), and the accuracy performances were 84% and 83.33%, respectively, for sentiment detection and 66% and 70% for emotion-specific metaphorical interpretation. The results demonstrate that our approach can be used to assist readers with metaphorical emotional understanding in Chinese poetry.

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