Metaphor Recognition Research Articles

Effects of Inference Requirements on Comprehension and Recognition of Metaphors

This study investigated the effects of inference requirements on the comprehension of metaphors and on the recognition of implicitly and explicitly stated metaphor components (topics, vehicles, grounds). Forty undergraduates were administered a computer-controlled comprehension task (using proportional metaphors), a recognition memory task (using key terms from the proportional metaphors), and a metaphor interpretation task. Analysis of latency and error data provided support for levels-of-processing memory theory. Better memory appeared to result from cognitive effort rather than time-on-task or semantic elaboration. Evidence supported a view of metaphor processing as similar to literal language processing. Little support was found for either the salience imbalance theory of metaphor or for a strong interactionist theory. Findings from metaphor interpretations supported a holistic rather than an analytic approach to the processing proportional metaphors.

Exploring a Metaphor of Exposure

DEITY AND SEXUALITY ALIKE are often hedged around with proscription. In cultures where the strict control of human sexuality is invested with religious sanctions, this circumstance may generate strong sense of analogy between the sexual and the divine. As Warren Shibles asks, How much of deity is merely metaphorical sexual euphemism and personification?' The question is to some extent rhetorical; but even if its general implications are not fully accepted, it directs attention to the use of divine images as euphemistic surrogates for human sexuality. In the most catholic terms, this is but special case of the widespread recognition of metaphor as an encapsulation of paradox. This recognition has been elaborated in number of different ways. Thus, K. Basso treats metaphor as set of appropriately ill-formed utterances, Ricoeur as misallocation of concepts, I. A. Richards as tension between likeness and dissimilarity, Fernandez as a sign-image upon an inchoate subject, while in Kenneth Burke's terminology, metaphor belongs to the wider phenomenon of perspective by incongruity.'2 The concept of purposive non-conventionality, though likewise applied by Crick to wider domain of semantic investigation, expresses what is most readily recognized as definitively