Abstract
Research on metaphorical language has shown ties between abstractness and emotionality with regard to metaphoricity; prior work is however limited to the word and sentence levels, and up to date there is no empirical study establishing the extent to which this is also true on the discourse level. This paper explores which textual and perceptual features human annotators perceive as important for the metaphoricity of discourses and expressions, and addresses two research questions more specifically. First, is a metaphorically-perceived discourse more abstract and more emotional in comparison to a literally- perceived discourse? Second, is a metaphorical expression preceded by a more metaphorical/abstract/emotional context than a synonymous literal alternative? We used a dataset of 1,000 corpus-extracted discourses for which crowdsourced annotators (1) provided judgements on whether they perceived the discourses as more metaphorical or more literal, and (2) systematically listed lexical terms which triggered their decisions in (1). Our results indicate that metaphorical discourses are more emotional and to a certain extent more abstract than literal discourses. However, neither the metaphoricity nor the abstractness and emotionality of the preceding discourse seem to play a role in triggering the choice between synonymous metaphorical vs. literal expressions. Our dataset is available at https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/data/discourse-met-lit.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.lrec-1.564
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5261–5273
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.564
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Prisca Piccirilli and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2022. Features of Perceived Metaphoricity on the Discourse Level: Abstractness and Emotionality. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5261–5273, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- Features of Perceived Metaphoricity on the Discourse Level: Abstractness and Emotionality (Piccirilli & Schulte im Walde, LREC 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.lrec-1.564.pdf