Representing Regularities in the Metaphoric Lexicon

Representing Regularities in the Metaphoric Lexicon James H. MARTIN Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Computer Science Division University of California Berkeley, California 94720 Abstract This paper describes a system for representing knowledge about conventional metaphors for use by natural language analysis, generation and acquisition systems. A system of hierarchically related structured associations is used. These associations are implemented as a part of the KODIAK representation language. Particular attention is paid in this paper to representational mechanisms that can capture general- izations over the system of conventional metaphors as a whole. 1. Introduction The most commonly occurring words in English display a wide range of metaphorically motivated meanings. A knowledge representation system capable of representing these meanings must satisfy two competing requirements. The first requirement is that it must be capable of representing the specific details of each lexicalized metaphor. More precisely it must provide enough knowledge to permit the easy recognition and interpretation of a particular use when it is encountered. The second requirement is that the representation must capture the relevant generalizations manifested by the system of meta- phors underlying the lexicon taken as a whole. The system therefore must represent both highly specific facts and capture systematic generalizations. 2. Conventional Metaphors A conventional metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) con- sists of source and target concepts. The target concept is the concept that is actually under consideration. The source specifies the concepts in terms of which the target concept is being viewed. When we refer to metaphoric knowledge we mean explicit knowledge of the conventional associations between various source and target domains. These associations are a conventional part of the language. The first requirement therefore is that the representation must be able to capture individual metaphors as concepts con- sisting of sets of associations between source and target con- cepts. Consider example (1), (1) How can I kill a process? This example, from the UNIX domain, involves the conven- tional metaphor that to kill an ongoing process means to ter- minate it. The target concepts involve computer processes and the actions that terminate them. The source concept is that of the action of causing a living thing to die. The metaphor con- sists of the source, target and the set of associations linking them. The associations specify the correspondences between the source and target concepts. In this example they must specify that: the concept kill corresponds to terminate, the vic- tim of the killing is the process terminated and that the killer is the agent of the termination. 3. Metaphorical Regularities It is not enough for the representation to simply account for each individual conventional metaphor in the lexicon. The set of metaphorical word senses in the language taken as a * "Ihil research was sponsored in part by the Defense Advance Research Plojeets Agency (DOD), A1pa Order No. 4871, Monitored by Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command under Contract No. N00039-84-C-0089. whole exhibits a number of regularities that must be accounted for. This paper will consider two of the …

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