Abstract
Defining the specific role of the factors that affect metaphor processing is a fundamental step for fully understanding figurative language comprehension, either in discourse and conversation or in reading poems and novels. This study extends the currently available materials on everyday metaphorical expressions by providing the first dataset of metaphors extracted from literary texts and scored for the major psycholinguistic variables, considering also the effect of context. A set of 115 Italian literary metaphors presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and a subset of 65 literary metaphors embedded in their original texts (Experiment 2) were rated on several dimensions (word and phrase frequency, readability, cloze probability, familiarity, concreteness, difficulty and meaningfulness). Overall, literary metaphors scored around medium-low values on all dimensions in both experiments. Collected data were subjected to correlation analysis, which showed the presence of a strong cluster of variables—mainly familiarity, difficulty, and meaningfulness—when literary metaphor were presented in isolation. A weaker cluster was observed when literary metaphors were presented in the original contexts, with familiarity no longer correlating with meaningfulness. Context manipulation influenced familiarity, concreteness and difficulty ratings, which were lower in context than out of context, while meaningfulness increased. Throughout the different dimensions, the literary context seems to promote a global interpretative activity that enhances the open-endedness of the metaphor as a semantic structure constantly open to all possible interpretations intended by the author and driven by the text. This dataset will be useful for the design of future experimental studies both on literary metaphor and on the role of context in figurative meaning, combining ecological validity and aesthetic aspects of language.
Highlights
We produce approximately one novel metaphor every 25 words, based on an estimation on TV programs [1]
In the last thirty years, metaphor has become a topic of investigation for cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, and much work in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience has examined the features and mechanisms of metaphor comprehension, by employing a variety of paradigms and carefully built materials simulating the metaphorical expressions used in everyday conversation. ‘‘My lawyer is a shark’’ [5] is just one above all typical stimuli, which usually come on a par with equivalent literal controls
The materials can be employed in studies comparing literary and non-literary metaphors, as the main psycholinguistic variables employed in studies on everyday figurative language are taken into account, offering a reasonable range of values to allow for independent manipulations
Summary
We produce approximately one novel metaphor every 25 words, based on an estimation on TV programs [1]. Strong evidence showed that, when utterances are embedded in richer context, the difference between metaphorical and literal utterances is much reduced in terms of reading times [7]. This pattern was taken as evidence for the ‘‘direct access’’ [8], which argues that processing metaphors involves a single mechanism that is sensitive both to linguistic and non-linguistic information, and that lexical and contextual levels interact in the very early stages of metaphor comprehension. The Graded Salience Hypothesis [9] provides an alternative suggestion to reconcile the direct and indirect view by overcoming the distinction between literal and metaphorical language and introducing the distinction between salient and non-salient meanings. Neuropragmatics too has devoted attention to metaphor processing, showing the involvement of a bilateral pattern of activations, related to linguistic as well as non-linguistic processes, especially mindreading [15,16,17]
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