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Article published In:
Current challenges in metaphor research
Edited by Nina Julich-Warpakowski and Paula Pérez-Sobrino
[Metaphor and the Social World 13:1] 2023
► pp. 59–80

Semantic distance predicts metaphoricity and creativity judgments in synesthetic metaphors

| University of Birmingham
| Università di Genova
This paper discusses a way of operationalizing metaphoricity quantitatively using a numerical measure of the semantic distance between two domains. We demonstrate the construct validity of this measure with respect to metaphoricity and creativity judgments in the domain of English synesthetic metaphors – expressions such as sweet melody and loud color that involve combinations of terms from conceptually distinct sensory modalities. In a pre-registered study, we find that a continuous measure of sensory modality difference predicts metaphoricity and creativity judgments. While our results use synesthetic metaphors as a test case, it is possible to extend the application of our measure of semantic distance to other metaphorical expressions. In addition to demonstrating the utility of this measure, this work also demonstrates the utility of rating data in the domain of metaphor research.
Keywords: metaphor identification, norms, ratings, synesthetic metaphor, perception, perceptual metaphor, cosine similarity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Modality ratings
    • 2.2Synesthetic metaphors and cosine similarity
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Pre-registration and data availability
    • 3.2Stimulus creation
    • 3.3Word frequencies
    • 3.4Participants
    • 3.5Procedure
    • 3.6Data exclusion
    • 3.7Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Experiment 1: Metaphoricity
    • 4.2Experiment 2: Creativity
    • 4.3Correlation between Experiment 1 and Experiment 2
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.00029.win
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