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Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age: Theory and methods for building repositories of figurative language
Edited by Marianna Bolognesi, Mario Brdar and Kristina Š. Despot
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 8] 2019
► pp. 75–98

Chapter 3
Metaphor in the age of mechanical production

(Or: Turning potential metaphors into deliberate metaphors)

| University College Dublin

A large repository of familiar linguistic metaphors is also an implicit repository of the knowledge any agent needs to generate and understand novel linguistic metaphors. Moreover, a sufficiently large repository of resonant juxtapositions is a rich source of the potential metaphors that an active imagination can rework and reframe as deliberate metaphors of its own. When using Web data as a knowledge resource for metaphor, it makes sense to think of the algorithms and tools for manipulating this knowledge as services that can be called upon to generate and understand deliberate metaphors on demand. A Web service called MetaphorMagnet that provides this functionality to third-party clients is presented, allowing other applications to exhibit a measure of their own figurative creativity.

Keywords: deliberate metaphors, potential metaphors, web services, Metaphor Magnet, metaphor generation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.From potential metaphors to deliberate metaphors
  • 3.Potential similes and affective models
    • 3.1Affective modelling
  • 4.Metaphor interpretation as metaphor expansion
    • 4.1Metaphor expansion
    • 4.2Metaphor in action: A worked example
  • 5.Empirical evaluation
    • 5.1The affect of stereotypes and properties
    • 5.2Placing an affective spin on stereotypes
    • 5.3Representational adequacy of metaphors
    • 5.4Human judgment
  • 6.Metaphor as a resource and a public Web service
  • 7.Conclusions: Explaining the world with deliberate metaphors
  • References
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.8.04vea
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