What Drives the Use of Metaphorical Language? Negative Insights from Abstractness, Affect, Discourse Coherence and Contextualized Word Representations

Abstract

Given a specific discourse, which discourse properties trigger the use of metaphorical language, rather than using literal alternatives? For example, what drives people to say grasp the meaning rather than understand the meaning within a specific context? Many NLP approaches to metaphorical language rely on cognitive and (psycho-)linguistic insights and have successfully defined models of discourse coherence, abstractness and affect. In this work, we build five simple models relying on established cognitive and linguistic properties -frequency, abstractness, affect, discourse coherence and contextualized word representations -to predict the use of a metaphorical vs. synonymous literal expression in context. By comparing the models' outputs to human judgments, our study indicates that our selected properties are not sufficient to systematically explain metaphorical vs. literal language choices.

Embodiment of color metaphor: an image-based visual analysis of the Chinese color terms hēi ‘black’ and bái ‘white’

“…The results reveal the relative weakness of the literal meanings of hēi and bái in expressing emotions compared to their metaphorical meanings. However, it is noted that the abstractness degree of these meanings may also correlate with their degrees of emotionality, according to Piccirilli and im Walde (2022), which was not discussed in the current study. Future inquiries are needed for further exploration.…”