Abstract
Literal language is commonly defined in terms of direct meaning, i.e., any literal utterance must convey a unique meaning. Such meaning has to be the one conventionally accepted to guarantee a successful communication. Figurative language, on the other hand, could be regarded as the opposite of literal language. Thus, whereas the latter is assumed to communicate a direct and explicit meaning, figurative language is related to the communication of veiled or implicit meanings. For instance, the word pozolero (stewmaker), which literally refers to a person who cooks a traditional Mexican food, when it is used in a figurative utterance, it can refer to different concepts, which are hardly related to food. Therefore, it can work instead of hitman, murderer, drug dealer, and others, in such a way its literal meaning is intentionally deviated in favor of secondary interpretations. In this regard, we are focused on analyzing the use of figurative language in an atypical context: drug trafficking. To this end, a corpus about narco language in Spanish was built. This corpus was used to train a word embedding model to identify creative ways to name narco-related concepts. The results show that various concepts are commonly expressed through figurative devices, such as metaphor, metonymy, or mental imagery. This fact corroborates that figurative language is quite recurrent in our daily communication, regardless of the context. In addition, we show how this creativity can be recognized by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.
Highlights
Language has been described from dichotomous points of view: langue and parole, synchrony and diachrony, paradigmatic and syntagmatic, signifier and signified, oral and written, an so on
After manually analyzing the contexts in which the 151 words appeared in our corpus, we noticed that two figurative devices are the most common to refer to narco-related concepts: Metaphor and metonymy
The authors state that metaphorical expressions in language are linked to concepts, in a systematic way, we can use linguistic expressions to study the nature of metaphorical concepts and to gain a better understanding of the metaphorical nature of our activities
Summary
Language has been described from dichotomous points of view: langue and parole, synchrony and diachrony, paradigmatic and syntagmatic, signifier and signified, oral and written, an so on. We assume another dichotomous relationship: literal language and figurative language. Literal language is commonly defined in terms of direct meaning, i.e., any literal utterance must convey a unique meaning. Such meaning has to be the one conventionally accepted to guarantee a successful communication. Various experts have pointed out certain properties of literal language: it is direct, grammatically specified, sentential, necessary, and context-free (see Searle [2]). It is assumed that this category of language must be invariant in all contexts
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