1,721,776 research outputs found
Using semantic feature norms to investigate how the visual and verbal modes afford metaphor construction and expression
Full text linkIn this study, two modalities of expression (verbal and visual) are compared and contrasted, in relation to their ability and their limitations to construct and express metaphors. A representative set of visual metaphors and a representative set of linguistic metaphors are here compared, and the semantic similarity between metaphor terms is modeled within the two sets. Such similarity is operationalized in terms of semantic features produced by informants in a property generation task (e.g., McRae et al., 2005). Semantic features provide insights into conceptual content, and play a role in deep conceptual processing, as opposed to shallow linguistic processing. Thus, semantic features appear to be useful for modeling metaphor comprehension, assuming that metaphors are matters of thought rather than simple figures of speech (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The question tackled in this paper is whether semantic features can account for the similarity between metaphor terms of both visual and verbal metaphors. For this purpose, a database of semantic features was collected and then used to analyze fifty visual metaphors and fifty verbal metaphors. It was found that the number of semantic features shared between metaphor terms is predicted by the modality of expression of the metaphor: the terms compared in visual metaphors share semantic features, while the terms compared in verbal metaphors do not. This suggests that the two modalities of expression afford different ways to construct and express metaphors
Modeling Semantic Similarity between Metaphor Terms of Visual vs. Linguistic Metaphors through Flickr Tag Distributions
Full text linkThis study aims at modeling the semantic similarity between metaphor terms by means of a distributional method based on a Big Data stream: Flickr tags. As explained in the article, this distributional model, Flickr Distributional Tagspace (FDT), captures primarily relational similarity between concept pairs, that is, between tags that appear in similar tagsets (and therefore in similar pictures). A long established view in metaphor theory claims that metaphors pertain to the conceptual dimension of meaning, but while different models aim at explaining how language constructs and represents metaphorical conceptual structures, we still know very little about how other modalities (for example, images) achieve metaphor construction and expression. A comprehensive theory, which argues in favor of the conceptual nature of metaphor, cannot afford to be biased toward the analysis and modeling of one specific modality of expression, thus neglecting potential modality-specific differences. The present study, conducted through FDT, found that visual and linguistic metaphors behave differently, in that the similarity between two aligned concepts in a visual metaphor appears to be significantly higher than the similarity between two concepts aligned in a linguistic metaphor (which, in turn, does not differ substantially from the similarity between two randomly paired concepts). These findings suggest that the relational similarity between two metaphor terms (captured and modeled through FDT) is crucial for visual metaphors but not for linguistic metaphors. An additional content analysis, also reported here, shows that the type of semantic information encoded in the related tags (i.e., the contexts on which the contingency matrices of this distributional method are built) differs, in relation to the modality of the metaphor: while situation-related and entity-related features are typically associated with concepts aligned in visual metaphors, introspections, and taxonomic features are typically associated with concepts aligned in linguistic metaphors
The Bilingual Lexicon, Semantic Links in L1 versus Episodic Links in L2: a case study
No full textResults from psycholinguistic studies suggest that lexical representations in L1 and L2
might not have the same nature: if L1 words are stored on a semantic basis, in the semantic memory, novice bilinguals might store L2 words on an episodic basis, creating
lexical representations that show close connections with the contexts in which the word
is experienced, rather than with more abstract concepts. Thus, in tasks where episodic
connections are stimulated, participants should perform better in L2. These insights are
investigated through an experiment performed with pseudo-verbs
Abstract concepts: Structure, processing and modeling. TopiCS in Cognitive Science, Special Issue
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La Competenza Lessicale nei Processi di Apprendimento di L2 e All’interno del Metodo Didattico FICCS
No full textFlickr® Distributional Tagspace: Evaluating the Semantic Spaces emerging from Flickr® Tags Distributions
No full textFlickr users tag their personal pictures with a variety of keywords. Such annotations could provide genuine insights on salient aspects emerging from the personal experiences that have been captured in the picture, which range beyond the purely visual features, or the language-based associations. Mining the emergent semantic patterns of these complex open- ended large-scale bodies of uncoordinated annotations provided by humans is the goal of this chapter. This is achieved by means of distributional semantics, i.e. by relying on the idea that concepts that appear in similar contexts have similar meanings (e.g. LSA, Landauer, Dumais 1997). This chapter presents the Flickr Distributional Tagspace (FDT), a distributional semantic space built on Flickr tag co-occurrences, and evaluates it follows: 1) through a comparison between the semantic representations that it produces, and those that are obtained from speaker generated features norms collected in experimental setting , as well as with WordNet-based metrics of semantic similarity between words; 2) through a categorization task and a consequent cluster analysis. The results of the two studies suggest that FDT can deliver semantic representations that correlate with those that emerge from aggregations of features norms, and can cluster fairly homogeneous categories and subcategories of related concepts
Perspectives on abstract concepts: From cognitive processing to semantic representation.
No full textHuman language is the most powerful communication system that evolution has produced. Within this system, we can talk about things we can physically see, such as cats and tables, but also about more abstract entities, such as theories and feelings. But how are these abstract concepts grounded in human cognition and represented in the mind? How are they constructed in language? And how are they used in natural communication settings?
This book addresses these questions through a collection of studies that relate to various theoretical frameworks, ranging from Conceptual Metaphor Theory to Words as Social Tools. Contributors investigate how abstract concepts are grounded in the mind, represented in language, and used in verbal discourse. This richness is matched by a range of methods used throughout the volume, from neuroimaging to computational modeling, and from behavioral experiments to corpus analyses
Birational geometry of moduli spaces of configurations of points on the line
No full textIn this paper, we study the geometry of GIT configurations of n ordered points on P1 both from the birational and the biregular viewpoint. In particular, we prove that any extremal ray of the Mori cone of effective curves of the quotient.P1/n== PGL.2/, taken with the symmetric polarization, is generated by a one dimensional boundary stratum of the moduli space. Furthermore, we develop some technical machinery that we use to compute the canonical divisor and the Hilbert polynomial of.P1/n== PGL.2/ in its natural embedding, and its automorphism group
Abstract Concepts: Structure, Processing and Modelling
No full textOur ability to deal with abstract concepts is one of the most intriguing faculties of human cognition. Still, we know little about how such concepts are formed, processed, and represented in mind. For example, because abstract concepts do not designate referents that can be experienced through our body, the role of perceptual experiences in shaping their content remains controversial.
Current theories suggest a variety of alternative explanations to the question 'how abstract concepts are represented in the human mind'. These views pinpoint specific streams of semantic information that would play a prominent role in shaping the content of abstract concepts, such as: situation-based information (e.g. Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005), affective information (Kousta et al. 2011), and linguistic information (Louwerse, 2011). Rarely, these theoretical views are directly compared.
In this special issue, current views are presented in their most recent and advanced form, and directly compared and discussed in a debate, which is reported at the end of each article. As a result, new exciting questions and challenges arise. These questions and challenges, reported in this introductory article, can arguably pave the way to new empirical studies and theoretical developments on the nature of abstract concepts
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