Metaphor Recognition Research Articles

Images of Rebirth: Cognitive Poetics and Transformational Soteriology in the Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul by Hugo Lundhaug (review)

Reviewed by: Images of Rebirth: Cognitive Poetics and Transformational Soteriology in the Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul by Hugo Lundhaug Blossom Stefaniw Hugo Lundhaug Images of Rebirth: Cognitive Poetics and Transformational Soteriology in the Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 73 Leiden: Brill, 2010 Pp. 594. $236.00. This book has not received the attention it deserves. Images of Rebirth is of particular value to the study of ascetic Christianities in Egypt, because it interprets hitherto incomprehensible texts from the Nag Hammadi find. The study achieves a coherent and convincing interpretation of The Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul by applying analytical resources from cognitive linguistics. Scholars have struggled to make sense of the Nag Hammadi texts, and the two discussed in this study are not among the more transparent. By examining the reigning metaphors in each text and the allusions on which they depend, Lundhaug accesses the map of religious life available to the Nag Hammadi readers, tracing out how these texts would be understood given contemporaneous religious pre-occupations and the literary and religious knowledge of the fourth-century readers. The transformational soteriology marked in the title of the study refers to the reigning metaphors of each source text, which mediate ideas about the development and cultivation of the soul through images of kinship and reproduction. Since metaphors depend on shared human experience, this approach is particularly well-suited to interpret texts whose authors and compilers are unknown to us; it makes apparent what else they were reading or assuming that the audience read. The book is structured around three primary chapters, the first of which sets out the problem to be treated, and a concluding chapter comparing the two source texts. In chapter 2, Lundhaug discusses Theoretical and Methodological Issues in depth, laying out the cognitive mechanisms of metaphor, drawing especially on the work of Lakoff and Johnson and Eubanks. The theory he uses for the task he has set himself (to find and apply an interpretive tool appropriate to the problems presented by two densely allusive and seemingly incoherent texts) is called blending theory. The difference between blending theory and mere recognition of metaphor or intertextuality is that blending theory attends to the generative aspect of allusive interactions. Blending theory shows how the two domains elicited by a metaphor or allusion (the body of Christ and the eucharistic bread) relate [End Page 295] mutually and elicit a third thing. (One is called upon not just to think that this bread is a body and thus different than it seems, but also that bodies in general are different than they seem.) This bilateral and generative aspect of blending theory is what makes it religiously potent: Metaphors centered on reproduction and kinship gain special traction among people who have problematized their physicality and their attachment to family or spouse by pursuing an ascetic life. Chapter 3 explains how the Exegesis of the Soul is driven by a narrative of the feminization of the soul: “The soul’s fall into matter and attachment to transitory and material things is described in terms of a wife leaving her husband in favor of a life of adultery and prostitution, and in terms of an unnatural masculinization. The salvation of the soul consequently requires her to regain her original femininity and virginity, marry Christ, and stay faithful to him as a subordinate wife” (151). A few key blends bring together the readers’ images of virginity, prostitution, or wedding feasts, as gained from their shared textual experience, with their physical experience of sexuality, marriage, and reproduction. Lundhaug describes this as a pedagogically effective “rhetoric that lets the readers or audience reach the most important insights on their own, in light of shared cognitive models and texts which are already established as authoritative” (124). By thus eliciting assent and response from the reader, such texts also serve to consolidate community identity, because they activate and apply shared knowledge and shared estimations of certain (inter)texts as authoritative. On Lundhaug’s analysis, the ideal reader of the Exegesis of the Soul had internalized knowledge of Scripture and of a Christian...

Perceptual symbols of creativity: Coldness elicits referential, warmth elicits relational creativity

Research in the cognitive and social psychological science has revealed the pervading relation between body and mind. Physical warmth leads people to perceive others as psychological closer to them and to be more generous towards others. More recently, physical warmth has also been implicated in the processing of information, specifically through perceiving relationships (via physical warmth) and contrasting from others (via coldness). In addition, social psychological work has linked social cues (such as mimicry and power cues) to creative performance. The present work integrates these two literatures, by providing an embodied model of creative performance through relational (warm=relational) and referential (cold=distant) processing. The authors predict and find that warm cues lead to greater creativity when 1) creating drawings, 2) categorizing objects, and 3) coming up with gifts for others. In contrast, cold cues lead to greater creativity, when 1) breaking set in a metaphor recognition task, 2) coming up with new pasta names, and 3) being abstract in coming up with gifts. Effects are found across different populations and age groups. The authors report implications for theory and discuss limitations of the present work.

Comprehension of metaphors in patients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders

BackgroundMetaphors, mainly proverbs and idiomatic expressions of ordinary life are commonly used as a model for concretism. Previous studies have shown impaired metaphor comprehension in patients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders compared to either psychiatric or non-psychiatric control subject. The aim of this study was to detect possible quantitative differences in figurative processing between patients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and healthy controls. MethodsIn order to analyse possible dissociations of different aspects of figurative speech, a range of metaphor tasks was used to distinguish between recognition of familiar metaphors, paraphrasing the meaning of the latter and generating novel metaphors: we used a standard proverb test for conventional metaphors consisting of a multiple-choice and a paraphrasing task, and the Metaphoric Triads Test for the assessment of novel metaphors. We included 40 patients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and 43 healthy control subjects. ResultsOur results showed that patients had impaired figurative speech processing regarding novel and conventional metaphors. Associations with cognitive functions were detected. Performance on the paraphrasing task was associated with the severity of negative symptoms. ConclusionWe conclude that patients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders do exhibit impairments in the recognition and paraphrasing of conventional and the generation of novel metaphors and that some cognitive domains as well the extent of negative symptoms might be associated with these deficits.

Data-Driven Metaphor Recognition and Explanation

Recognizing metaphors and identifying the source-target mappings is an important task as metaphorical text poses a big challenge for machine reading. To address this problem, we automatically acquire a metaphor knowledge base and an isA knowledge base from billions of web pages. Using the knowledge bases, we develop an inference mechanism to recognize and explain the metaphors in the text. To our knowledge, this is the first purely data-driven approach of probabilistic metaphor acquisition, recognition, and explanation. Our results shows that it significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in recognizing and explaining metaphors.

The role of working memory in the comprehension of unfamiliar and familiar metaphors

AbstractComprehension of unfamiliar metaphors (mercy blanket) is an effortful cognitive process that requires the formation of a novel metaphoric mapping between two disparate domains during which irrelevant properties have to be suppressed. The present study aims to examine the relationship between the comprehension of both unfamiliar and familiar metaphors and working memory. Three experiments were conducted: a comprehension task (Experiment 1), a recognition task (Experiments 2a and 2b), and a free recall task (Experiment 3). In the first experiment comprehension of both unfamiliar and familiar metaphors correlated with digit span backward but not with digit span forward. Results of the second experiment revealed that unfamiliar metaphors induced a higher rate of semantic errors relative to phonological errors, whereas familiar metaphors induced the same number of phonological and semantic errors. The third experiment confirmed that unfamiliar metaphors were harder to recall than were familiar metaphors. These findings show that working memory capacity may be involved in the computation of unfamiliar metaphoric interpretations, and more specifically in the process of suppressing irrelevant information via the central executive. Familiar metaphor recognition may rely on either phonological codes that are maintained in the phonological loop or on semantic processing that involves long term storage.

Automatic metaphor processing in adults with Asperger syndrome: a metaphor interference effect task

This paper investigates automatic processing of novel metaphors in adults with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and typically developing controls. We present an experiment combining a semantic judgment task and a recognition task. Four types of sentences were compared: Literally true high-typical sentences, literally true low-typical sentences, apt metaphors, and scrambled metaphors (literally false sentences which are not readily interpretable as metaphors). Participants were asked to make rapid decisions about the literal truth of such sentences. The results revealed that AS and control participants showed significantly slower RTs for metaphors than for scrambled metaphors and made more mistakes in apt metaphoric sentences than in scrambled metaphors. At the same time, there was higher recognition of apt metaphors compared with scrambled metaphors. The findings indicate intact automatic metaphor processing in AS and replicate previous findings on automatic metaphor processing in typically developing individuals.

Markets, metaphors, and mania

Financial markets have sufficient power over the real economy to enable them to expand their profitable activities and extract compensation for their services from the real economy – not necessarily commensurate with the economic value of those services – without the real economy being aware of it being done. Given that markets have this ability to manipulate the economy to their advantage, there is no guarantee that the equilibrium size of the market – meaning that there is no incentive for firms to either enter or exit – is the equilibrium size of the market for the most efficient operation of the real economy. Financial markets are quite literally parasites in every biological sense of the word, and more widespread recognition of this apt metaphor might lead to more effective public policy decision-making. Market insiders are not selfless public servants but are looking out for their own self-interest. There is a market for financial services that itself has few, if any, characteristics of a free market.

Perceptual Symbols of Creativity: Coldness Elicits Referential, Warmth Elicits Relational Creativity

Research in the cognitive and social psychological science has revealed the pervading relation between body and mind. Physical warmth leads people to perceive others as psychological closer to them and to be more generous towards others. More recently, physical warmth has also been implicated in the processing of information, specifically through perceiving relationships (via physical warmth) and the distancing from others (via coldness). In addition, social psychological work has linked social cues (such as mimicry and power cues) to creative performance. The present work integrates these two literatures, by providing an embodied model of creative performance through relational (warm = relational) and referential (cold = distant) processing. The authors predict and find that warmth cues lead to greater creativity when 1) creating drawings, 2) categorizing objects, and 3) coming up with gifts for others. In contrast, cold cues lead to greater creativity, when 1) breaking set in a metaphor recognition task, 2) coming up with new pasta names, and 3) being abstract in coming up with gifts. Effects are found across different populations and age groups. The authors report implications for theory and discuss limitations of the present work.

On the Cognitive Style of Field (In)dependence as a Predicator of L2 Learners’ Performance in Recognition and Text-based Tests of Metaphor

Not only being a linguistic device to add color to texts, metaphor is an important feature of our thinking and education (Jensen, 2006). In the same line, Kovecses (2002) believes in the important role of metaphor in human thought, understanding, and making our social, cultural, and psychological reality. Yet on a closer look, L2 pedagogy has piqued L2 educators’ interest in understanding of L2 learner differences. One is the attempt to match the kind of instructional activities to L2 learners’ preferred styles. This study is an attempt to investigate the role of cognitive style of field (in) dependence (FI/FD) on L2 learners’ performance in recognition, text-based true-false, and text-based scriptally implicit tests of metaphor. For the purpose of this study, 80 senior undergraduate university students majoring in English Translation were selected from among 110 students through a 50-item Nelson English Language Proficiency Test adopted from Fowler and Norman Coe (1978) with reasonable measures of validity and reliability. Then, the cognitive style of FI/FD and metaphorical performance were assessed, respectively. As for the former, GEFT developed by Witkin, Raskin, Oltman, and Karp (1971) was run. Regarding the latter, refined through conducting factor analysis, the tests of metaphor were run. After running a one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), the data revealed a significant difference between the cognitive style of FI/FD on all kinds of metaphor tests. The study could have some implications for L2 research and pedagogy that will be discussed throughout the paper.

The study of metaphor as part of critical discourse analysis

This article discusses how the study of metaphoric and more generally, figurative language use contributes to critical discourse analysis (CDA). It shows how cognitive linguists’ recognition of metaphor as a fundamental means of concept- and argument-building can add to CDA's account of meaning constitution in the social context. It then discusses discrepancies between the early model of conceptual metaphor theory and empirical data and argues that discursive-pragmatic factors as well as sociolinguistic variation have to be taken into account in order to make cognitive analyses more empirically and socially relevant. In conclusion, we sketch a modified cognitive approach informed by Relevance Theory within CDA.

The relationship between visual metaphor comprehension and recognition of similarities in children with learning disabilities

Previous studies have shown metaphoric comprehension deficits in children with learning disabilities. To understand metaphoric language, children must have enough semantic knowledge about the metaphorical terms and the ability to recognize similarity between two different domains. In the current study visual and verbal metaphor understanding was assessed in 20 children with learning disabilities (LD) and 20 typically developed (TD) children. Results showed that LD children scored significantly lower than TD children in the comprehension of conventional metaphors, and idioms. However, visual and novel metaphor comprehension, which does not rely on prior knowledge, did not differ between the two groups. Furthermore, our results suggest that higher analogical thinking facilitates visual metaphor comprehension in the LD group. In the TD group, metaphor comprehension correlates with higher semantic knowledge.

A fire station in your body: Metaphors in educational texts on HIV/AIDS

This study focuses on metaphors used in South African HIV/AIDS education to explain the struggle of the immune system when it becomes infected with HIV. Three versions of an educational text on HIV/AIDS were presented to a total of 543 learners from secondary schools in the Western Cape. Each learner was given either a text version including a deliberate metaphor that had been selected with the purpose of changing the reader's perspective on the immune system (the immune system being presented metaphorically either as an army or as a fire brigade), or a text version without such a deliberate metaphor. The effects of these three text versions on understanding as perceived by the learners themselves, on attractiveness and on persuasiveness were investigated. Distinctions were made between respondents who apparently had recognised a metaphor in the text version with which they were presented and those who had not. No effects of text version on perceived understanding, attractiveness and persuasiveness were found. There were clear effects, however, of metaphor recognition. Readers who appeared to have recognised a metaphor found the text version they had read more understandable, attractive and persuasive than other readers. No interaction effects of text version and metaphor recognition were found.

METAPHOR RECOGNITION: CHMETA, A PATTERN-BASED SYSTEM

Metaphor recognition presents a computational challenge, in part due to metaphoric deviation from literal thinking, and also because of a metaphor’s various linguistic expressions. This article forwards a new computational method, an integrated treatment of metaphor recognition from the computational perspective, which recent related studies have not entirely addressed. The authors differentiate metaphor recognition from complex metaphor inference and interpretation employing psychological clues. To accomplish this, we have developed a formalized system of metaphorical expression in metaphor role dependency schema, which specifically defines, classifies, and quantifies metaphorical anomalies, building a computable classification system for metaphors (incorporating 32 major patterns of metaphorical expressions) by providing a strategy to locate potential metaphorical anomalies in a target input sentence through a pattern recognition method and a metaphor components’ tagging approach. This metaphor recognition and tagging system is named and implemented as “CHMeta.” Experiment results support the validity and efficiency of this metaphor recognition system. Compared with most metaphor computation systems, which work mainly on a few examples, this system classifies major metaphorical expressions from a computational perspective and is able to recognize a variety of different kinds of metaphors, including nested ones. Thus, this is the first integrated work in computable classification, recognition, and tagging of large-scale metaphors in Chinese.

On possible factors in the aesthetic appreciation of metaphors

Abstract Gibbs (2002) investigated by experimental methods the question whether the recognition of metaphors in a literary text affects the aesthetic appreciation of recognized expressions. He found that recognition of metaphors improves aesthetic judgments. He explains this by reference to the conceptual theory of metaphor: Identifying a linguistic metaphor provides access to the underlying conceptual metaphor and opens up new ways of interpretation, thereby making the expression more appealing. In this paper, we note some conceptual arguments against Gibbs's conclusion and then present an experiment which aims to verify whether the improvement of judgments observed by Gibbs could have been caused by independent factors, such as social expectations. Surprisingly, although we did not find evidence for such effects, we were not able to reproduce Gibbs's results either. However, the data reveal that aesthetic judgments concerning metaphors are measurable to some extent.

Can discourse properties of metaphor affect metaphor recognition?

This paper presents an empirical study of metaphor recognition by means of an underlining task in a famous Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane”. The paper develops a three-dimensional approach to metaphor processing, in which metaphors are assumed to have linguistic, conceptual, and communicative functions for the construction of a mental representation of the discourse [Understanding Metaphor in Literature: An Empirical Approach, Longman, London, 1994]. A selection of structural metaphor properties for each of these discourse functions is discussed, and predictions are formulated regarding which variables are deemed to boost metaphor recognition. Five of the eight variables are shown to behave according to the predictions. The other three variables are related to each other and do not conform to the expectations. Some possible explanations of the results and suggestions for further research are offered in the conclusion.

Recognition of metaphor and irony in young adults: the impact of schizotypal personality traits

Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate two dissociable impairments of pragmatic language comprehension: (1) an insensitivity to irony, which is associated with poor theory-of-mind (i.e. a difficulty with inferring other people's thoughts); and (2) poor recognition of metaphors, which may reflect degraded semantics. This study investigated whether non-clinical high-schizotypal adults show similar impairments of pragmatic language. Thirty-six university students completed the Raine Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire, the Wechsler Memory Scale Logical-Memories subtest, Raven's Progressive Matrices and a story comprehension task that tested the ability to discriminate between incongruous statements and appropriate uses of ironical, metaphorical or literal speech. Counter to the pattern found for patients, high-schizotypal adults were just as capable as low-schizotypal adults of identifying appropriate metaphors, suggesting a discontinuity between schizophrenia and schizotypy for the metaphor-recognition problem. This study's finding of intact metaphor recognition in high-schizotypal adults contrasts with previous findings of poor proverb comprehension in these individuals and is interpreted in terms of different semantic processes required for recognizing and interpreting metaphors. Consistent with the pattern found for patients, high-schizotypal adults were significantly impaired in their ability to appreciate when a literally contradictory utterance could be interpreted as ironical, suggesting continuity between schizophrenia and schizotypy for the irony-appreciation problem.

On Different Types of International Relations Scholarship

International relations features different types of scholarship. These types are metaphor, history, theory, engineering, and pattern recognition. This essay discusses the nature and contribution of each type as research characteristic of these different undertakings shows substantial overtime continuity in attracting varying attention from identifiable communities. It also raises several concerns about the extant literature. These concerns address the problems of endogeneity, selection effects, concept stretching, over-determination and indeterminacy, multiple conjunctural causality, and falsifiable proposition. Although hardly representing novel discoveries, they present generic and seemingly persistent challenges to valid inference. While not irrelevant to the conduct of social inquiry in general, this review addresses specifically international relations scholarship.

Play and the Metaphors of the Body

Symptoms and the sense of reality are built out of the reified metaphors of the body. In clinical psychology we deal less with the frozen events of “objective reality” and more with the fluid experiences of a subjectivity. Metaphor is the language of experience. In this paper I will cover briefly a wide range of material including children's play configurations, children's fantasy narratives, libido development, the symbolic function, the role of metaphor in the construction of a world view, and the recognition of metaphor as an organizing concept in psychoanalytic theory and technique. In doing so, I will illustrate the relationship between play and the metaphors of the body.

Spatial/kinematic domain and lattice computers

Abstract An approach to analogical representation for objects and their motions in space is proposed. This approach involves lattice computer architectures and associated algorithms and is shown to be abstracted from the behaviour of human beings mentally solving spatial/kinematic puzzles. There is also discussion of where in this approach the modelling of human cognition leaves off and the engineering begins. The possible relevance of the approach to a number of issues in artificial intelligence is discussed. These issues include efficiency of sentential versus analogical representations, common sense reasoning, update propagation, learning performance tasks, diagrammatic representations, spatial reasoning, metaphor, human categorization, and pattern recognition. Lastly there is a discussion of the somewhat related approach involving cellular automata applied to computational physics.

When Is Metaphor? The Idea of Understanding in Theories of Metaphor

When Is Metaphor? The Idea of Understanding in Theories of Metaphor