Domain-transcending mappings in a system for metaphorical reasoning

Domain-transcending mappings in a system for metaphorical reasoning John A. Barnden, Sheila R. Glasbey, Mark G. Lee, Alan M. Wallington School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. {J.A.Barnden,S.R.Glasbey,M.G.Lee,A.M.Wallington}@cs.bham.ac.uk Abstract We illustrate how the use of metaphorical views for reasoning with metaphor re- quires the mapping of information such as event shape, event rate and men- tal/emotional states from the source do- main to the target domain. Such mappings are domain-independent and can be implemented by means of rules we call View Neutral Mapping Adjuncts (VNMAs). We give a list of the main VNMAs that appear to be required, and show how they can be incorporated into a pre-existing system (ATT-Meta) for metaphorical reasoning. 1 Introduction Lakoff (1994: p.212) gives the following exam- ple of metaphor in a song lyric. 1) We're driving in the fast lane on the freeway of love. Lakoff presents this as an example of the com- monly used conceptual metaphor (or, as we pre- fer to call it, 'metaphorical view') LOVE AS A JOURNEY. The progress of the love relationship is viewed as a journey, the lovers as people un- dertaking the journey, and the love relationship as the vehicle in which they are travelling. In other words, the journey is said to map to the re- lationship's progress, the travellers to the lovers, and the vehicle to the relationship. A metaphori- cal view consists, in part, of such a set of map- pings, from the "source domain" (the domain of literal interpretation of the metaphor) to the "tar- get domain" (the domain which is being de- scribed by means of the metaphor). Lakoff does not, however, explain how the excitement of the journey is mapped over from the source domain (i.e. the domain of vehicles and journeys) to the target domain (the domain of the lovers and their relationship). Yet the mapping of this emotional state seems to be a key part of the meaning of the metaphor, both to Lakoff and to us. In other examples (see section 3), it is simi- larly clear that additional aspects of the source domain must be mapped to the target domain. These include causation and ability, event shape, value-judgments, uncertainty, and so on. In order to achieve these mappings we have designed and started to implement a set of view neutral mapping adjuncts (VNMAs) 1 . We regard VNMAs as standard but implicit default aspects of all view-specific metaphorical mappings. They are defaults in that they can, in principle, be over- ridden by particular metaphorical views or by incompatibility with the understander's knowl- edge of the target. Our use of VNMAs is partly inspired by Car- bonell's (1982) proposal that certain aspects of sources tend to map over to targets, irrespective of the particular metaphorical view at hand. We adopt his basic suggestion, building on it by pro- posing a detailed and specific set of VNMAs. We study the efficacy of these VNMAs in real- discourse examples, and show how they can be …

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