Features of Perceived Metaphoricity on the Discourse Level: Abstractness and Emotionality

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 5261–5273 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 5261 Features of Perceived Metaphoricity on the Discourse Level: Abstractness and Emotionality Prisca Piccirilli, Sabine Schulte im Walde Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart Pfaffenwaldring 5b, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany {prisca.piccirilli,schulte}@ims.uni-stuttgart.de 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. lit- eral expressions. Our dataset is available at https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/data/discourse-met-lit. Keywords: metaphor, abstractness, emotionality, perception, discourse, crowdsourcing, annotation 1. Introduction Metaphors represent a “necessary, not just nice” ele- ment of everyday thought and communication (Ortony, 1975; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; van den Broek, 1981; Sch¨affner, 2004), as the underlying motivation of metaphorical language usage is to facilitate the un- derstanding of a more abstract target domain through linguistic expressions of a more concrete source do- main (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). For example, the metaphorical sentences I am at a crossroads in my life or He’s never let anyone get in his way, illustrate how the abstract concept of life in English is expressed through the more concrete concept of a journey. More than a simple stylistic way of expressing one’s thoughts, metaphors are a powerful instrument to facil- itate communication, as they are used to explain and/or explicate things (Kirklin, 2007; Stefanowitsch, 2008) that are unfamiliar or unknown (Glucksberg, 1989), but also in a more efficient way (Ortony, 1975). They have proven to shape thinking and influence reasoning (Boroditsky, 2011; Thibodeau and Boroditsky, 2011; Thibodeau et al., 2017), and they may also represent an effective persuasive device (Van Stee, 2018). According to corpus-linguistic studies, metaphors manifest themselves in general-domain text corpora in every third sentence (Gedigian et al., 2006; Shutova and Teufel, 2010; Steen et al., 2010), which makes the processing of metaphorical language primordial for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks and ap- plications. The vast majority …

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