The Nature of Metaphor

Metaphors are ubiquitous features of spoken and written language that permit us to experience one thing in terms of another. “Seeing is believing” helps us understand the abstract concept of belief in terms of the concrete sense of sight. Derived from two Greek words that mean “to transfer,” metaphors transfer certain attributes from the source domain, in our example, Seeing to the target domain of Believing. The chapter explores how metaphors have cognitive properties and allow us to learn new things and to express abstract ideas and complex relations. Metaphors are a powerful trope of figurative language and commonly appear in both formal medical writings and the informal daily interactions of doctors, patients, and the public more generally. The chapter describes how metaphors connect abstract and concrete domains and offers an array of examples that helps us decipher how metaphors originate from human experiences and how they evolve. It explores how metaphors frame perceptions and shape reality and their potency in the language of the clinic.

Verification column

Given the extensive applications of logics with concrete domains in verification and related areas, the shortage of an accessible survey on the topic is quite surprising. This article does much more than fill the gap, providing also useful and inspiring pointers for future work.

Concrete domains in logics

In this short survey, we present logical formalisms in which reasoning about concrete domains is embedded in formulae at the atomic level. These include temporal logics with concrete domains, description logics with concrete domains as well as variant formalisms. We discuss several proof techniques to solve logical decision problems for such formalisms, including those based on constrained automata or on translation into decidable second-order logics. We also present recent results mainly related to decidability and complexity as well as a selection of open problems.

A Study of Hot and Cold Metaphors in Iraqi Arabic

The present study is an attempt to explore the ways of an Iraqi Arabic speaker conceptualises his/her understanding of various abstract domains of emotions or feeling and attitudes through his/her experiences of concrete domains of Cold and Hot metaphors. Lakoff & Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory is adopted to analyse the collected data. Idiomatic expressions and proverbs are chosen specifically from the southern dialect where they are widely used in daily interaction. The data analysis classified the results according to their abstract and concrete domains of the sampled data. The findings of this study showed different conceptualisations of the Hot and Cold metaphor in Iraqi Arabic. The study concluded that these metaphors are used to conceive more of the abstract concepts of emotions, feelings, and attitudes. Cold domain is used to conceptualise the bad habits of people, and it is also used to conceptualise some good habits, on the other hand. Whereas Hot domain is used to conceptualise the more intensive of emotions and attitudes. The study concluded that the sharp emotions, feelings and attitudes that are understood from the conceptualisation of Hot and Cold conceptual metaphors, are experienced from the more concrete domains of hard things.

An ExpTime Upper Bound for ALC with Integers

Concrete domains, especially those that allow to compare features with numeric values, have long been recognized as a very desirable extension of description logics (DLs), and significant efforts have been invested into adding them to usual DLs while keeping the complexity of reasoning in check. For expressive DLs and in the presence of general TBoxes, for standard reasoning tasks like consistency, the most general decidability results are for the so-called ω-admissible domains, which are required to be dense. Supporting non-dense domains for features that range over integers or natural numbers remained largely open, despite often being singled out as a highly desirable extension. The decidability of some extensions of ALC with non-dense domains has been shown, but existing results rely on powerful machinery that does not allow to infer any elementary bounds on the complexity of the problem. In this paper, we study an extension of ALC with a rich integer domain that allows for comparisons (between features, and between features and constants coded in unary), and prove that consistency can be solved using automata-theoretic techniques in single exponential time, and thus has no higher worst-case complexity than standard ALC. Our upper bounds apply to some extensions of DLs with concrete domains known from the literature, support general TBoxes, and allow for comparing values along paths of ordinary (not necessarily functional) roles.

An algebraic perspective on abstract and concrete domains

Looking at isomorphic constructs from an algebraic perspective, this article suggests that every concrete construct is understood by reference to an underlying abstract schema in the mind of comprehender. The complex form of every abstract schema is created by the gradual development of its elementary form. Throughout the process of cognitive development, new features are added to the elementary form of abstract schema, which leads to gradual formation of a fully-developed abstract schema. Every developed abstract schema is the underlying source for understanding an infinite number of concrete isomorphic constructs. It is suggested that the process of the mapping of base domain (base construct) unto target domain (target construct) is conducted and mediated by an abstract domain. This abstract domain, which is free from concrete features of base and target, is isomorphic to both base and target domains. To describe the mediatory role of this abstract domain, it might be argued that the chain process of understanding a less familiar domain in terms of a relatively more familiar domain (salience imbalance model) cannot continue infinitely. This chain must stop at some point. This point is the abstract domain, which is isomorphic to base and target domains.

Resources not rulebooks

This paper explores the way that teachers use metaphors to think and talk about grammar and what this means for classroom practice. It does so by employing conceptual metaphor theory to analyse teachers’ metalinguistic discourse, focusing particularly on construals of grammar and grammar teaching. Based on a series of interviews with 24 UK-based secondary school English teachers, the findings suggest that teachers make extensive use of metaphor, often mapping the abstract domain of grammar with concrete domains such as construction material and rulebook. The discipline of English studies itself was often construed as a series of separate parts, with grammar occupying a physical space that was often seen as disconnected to other aspects of the curriculum. The findings are discussed in relation to sociocultural contexts, including the current climate of English teaching in the UK, educational policy discourse, public and professional views on language, and the place of grammar on the curriculum.

Query Rewriting for DL-Lite with n-ary Concrete Domains

We investigate ontology-based query answering (OBQA) in a setting where both the ontology and the query can refer to concrete values such as numbers and strings. In contrast to previous work on this topic, the built-in predicates used to compare values are not restricted to being unary. We introduce restrictions on these predicates and on the ontology language that allow us to reduce OBQA to query answering in databases using the so-called combined rewriting approach. Though at first sight our restrictions are different from the ones used in previous work, we show that our results strictly subsume some of the existing first-order rewritability results for unary predicates.