Metaphor as a Medium for Emotion: An Empirical Study

Proceedings of the Fifth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2016), pages 23–33, Berlin, Germany, August 11-12, 2016. Metaphor as a Medium for Emotion: An Empirical Study Saif M. Mohammad National Research Council Canada saif.mohammad@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca Ekaterina Shutova University of Cambridge, UK es407@cam.ac.uk Peter D. Turney Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence petert@allenai.org Abstract It is generally believed that a metaphor tends to have a stronger emotional im- pact than a literal statement; however, there is no quantitative study establishing the extent to which this is true. Further, the mechanisms through which metaphors convey emotions are not well understood. We present the first data-driven study comparing the emotionality of metaphor- ical expressions with that of their literal counterparts. Our results indicate that metaphorical usages are, on average, sig- nificantly more emotional than literal us- ages. We also show that this emotional content is not simply transferred from the source domain into the target, but rather is a result of meaning composition and inter- action of the two domains in the metaphor. 1 Introduction Metaphor gives our expression color, shape and character. Metaphorical language is a result of complex knowledge projection from one domain, typically a physical, closely experienced one, to another, typically more abstract and vague one (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). For instance, when we say “He shot down all of my arguments”, we project knowledge and inferences from the domain of battle (the source domain) onto our reasoning about arguments and debates (the target domain). While preserving the core meaning of the sen- tence, the use of metaphor allows us to introduce additional connotations and emphasize certain as- pects of the target domain, while downplaying oth- ers. Consider the following examples: (1) a. The new measures are strangling business. b. The new measures tightly regulate business. When we talk about “strangling business” in (1a) we express a distinct viewpoint on governmental regulation of business, as opposed to a more neu- tral factual statement expressed in (1b). The interplay of metaphor and emotion has been an object of interest in fields such as linguistics (Blanchette et al., 2001; Kovecses, 2003), polit- ical science (Lakoff and Wehling, 2012), cogni- tive psychology (Crawford, 2009; Thibodeau and Boroditsky, 2011) and neuroscience (Aziz-Zadeh and Damasio, 2008; Jabbi et al., 2008). A num- ber of computational approaches for sentiment po- larity classification of metaphorical language have also been proposed (Veale and Li, 2012; Kozareva, 2013; Strzalkowski et al., 2014). However, there is no quantitative study establishing the extent to which metaphorical language is used to express emotion nor a data-supported account of the mech- anisms by which this happens. Our study addresses two questions: (i) whether a metaphorical statement is likely to convey a stronger emotional content than its literal coun- terpart; and (ii) how this emotional content arises in the metaphor, i.e. whether it comes from the source domain, or from the target domain, or rather arises compositionally through interaction of the source and the target. To answer these ques- tions, we conduct a …

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