Lexical Conceptual Structure of Literal and Metaphorical Spatial Language: A Case Study of "Push"

Bonnie Dorr,Mari Olsen

doi:10.18653/v1/w18-1404

Abstract

Prior methodologies for understanding spatial language have treated literal expressions such as “Mary pushed the car over the edge” differently from metaphorical extensions such as “Mary’s job pushed her over the edge”. We demonstrate a methodology for standardizing literal and metaphorical meanings, by building on work in Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS), a general-purpose representational component used in machine translation. We argue that spatial predicates naturally extend into other fields (e.g., circumstantial or temporal), and that LCS provides both a framework for distinguishing spatial from non-spatial, and a system for finding metaphorical meaning extensions. We start with MetaNet (MN), a large repository of conceptual metaphors, condensing 197 spatial entries into sixteen top-level categories of motion frames. Using naturally occurring instances of English push , and expansions of MN frames, we demonstrate that literal and metaphorical extensions exhibit patterns predicted and represented by the LCS model.

Highlights

This paper explores representation and distribution of spatial metaphoric language, by identifying instances from the MetaNet (MN) repository of metaphors (David and Lakoff, 2013; Dodge et al, 2015; Stickles et al, 2015), clustering them according to common expressions (e.g., “change of location”), and representing both the literal and metaphorical senses of these expressions as combinations of primitives from Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS) (Jackendoff, 1983, 1990; Dorr, 1993; Dowty, 1979; Guerssel et al, 1985)
We show how to represent push metaphors in LCS according to the derived spatial metaphor classes, extend the classes to address cases of push absent from MN examples, and the converse: examples predicted to occur that were absent from the corpus
States (Argument1, Argument2): BE(Thing, Position) Jen was home ORIENT(Thing, Path) The sign points to the exit GO-EXT(Thing, Path) The highway runs through Montana

Summary

Introduction

This paper explores representation and distribution of spatial metaphoric language, by identifying instances from the MetaNet (MN) repository of metaphors (David and Lakoff, 2013; Dodge et al, 2015; Stickles et al, 2015), clustering them according to common expressions (e.g., “change of location”), and representing both the literal and metaphorical senses of these expressions as combinations of primitives from Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS) (Jackendoff, 1983, 1990; Dorr, 1993; Dowty, 1979; Guerssel et al, 1985). An initial search with text processing tools for Windows (public and proprietary) yielded more than 10k en-us sentences for the following spatial and motion strings: extend, span, contain, come, go, push, pull, enter, exit, rise, fall, skyrocket, plummet, turn back, forge ahead, headway, get out of, get into, drive, be down, be up, be in, be out, guide, follow, sprint, creep, drain, move along, advance We scoped this to just under 2k “Push Sentences” – small enough to review, but large enough to present an interesting distribution of forms. We conclude that the richness of the syntactic patterns available to Spatial (literal) uses of verbs and related nominals are available to their metaphorical counterparts, providing a structured way to investigate and represent metaphorical data, including future work exploring whether and why distributional differences may occur.

Background

Spatial Language Metaphors

Case Study: push

Discussion and Future

Findings

A Supplemental Material