The syntactic form of explicit as-similes provides a ready-made infrastructure for linguistic creativity that writers and speakers can exploit with remarkable freedom. This chapter adopts a computational approach to similes, asking: what kinds of knowledge must a computational agent possess so as to recognize the ironic intent of a humorous comparison and to what degree is this intent telegraphed to the audience by the use of specific markers or support structures? Using automated means to collect two very large corpora of similes, one that favours the conventional and one that favours the creative use of similes, the chapter describes the characteristics of similes used with ironic intent and the role played by ‘about’ as a scaffolding structure for creative similes.
2021. “Shall I (compare) compare thee?”. Yearbook of Phraseology 12:1 ► pp. 75 ff.
Manna, Raffaele, Antonio Pascucci, Maria Pia di Buono & Johanna Monti
2021. The Use of Figurative Language in an Italian Dream Description Corpus. In Formalising Natural Languages: Applications to Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities [Communications in Computer and Information Science, 1389], ► pp. 123 ff.
Colston, Herbert L.
2019. How Language Makes Meaning,
Zhang, Pengfei, Yi Cai, Junying Chen, Wenhao Chen & Hengjie Song
2019. Combining Part-of-Speech Tags and Self-Attention Mechanism for Simile Recognition. IEEE Access 7 ► pp. 163864 ff.
2018. Sarcasm and Irony Detection in English Tweets. In ICT Innovations 2018. Engineering and Life Sciences [Communications in Computer and Information Science, 940], ► pp. 120 ff.
Veale, Tony
2018. The “default” in our stars: Signposting non-defaultness in ironic discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 33:3 ► pp. 175 ff.
Parizoska, Jelena & Ivana Filipović Petrović
2017. Variation of Adjectival Slots in kao (‘as’) Similes in Croatian: A Cognitive Linguistic Account. In Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 10596], ► pp. 348 ff.
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