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home / papers / 2026 / Floating or Suggesting Ideas? A Large-Scale Contrastive Analysis of Metaphorical and Literal Verb–Object Constructions

Floating or Suggesting Ideas? A Large-Scale Contrastive Analysis of Metaphorical and Literal Verb–Object Constructions

Summary

The study examines how metaphorical and literal wording differ when both express nearly the same meaning. Large-scale empirical work on this contrast has been rare. The authors take 297 paired English verb–object (VO) expressions from VOLIMET (e.g., float idea vs. suggest idea). They expand the data with every ENCOW web-corpus sentence in which the noun is the verb's direct object, giving about 2.06M sentences. Verb and object are masked, and each VO's sentences are processed together by five text-analysis tools. These yield 2,293 features covering affect, lexical sophistication, syntax, cohesion and lexical diversity. The authors compare z-normalised scores across pairs and inside each pair.

Across pairs, literal contexts tend to have more frequent vocabulary, stronger cohesion and more regular structure. Metaphorical contexts carry more emotion, imageability and lexical variety. Individual pairs, however, diverge in inconsistent directions, so no single pattern separates metaphor from literal use. The differences are mostly construction-specific, which matters for metaphor modeling and for tasks such as MT and sentiment analysis.

Key points

  • Data: 297 metaphorical/literal VO pairs (from Piccirilli et al., 2024 / VOLIMET). The original 1,691 VOLIMET sentences were extended with ENCOW, giving 2,058,787 sentences in total.
  • Feature tools and counts: SEANCE (1,271), TAALES (461), TAASSC (355), TAACO (168) and TAALED (38), for a total of 2,293 features. Verb and object were replaced by MASK tokens to avoid lexical bias.
  • Cross-pair analysis: Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were run on z-scored features. A feature counted as important when p < 0.05 and the mean difference was at least 1 SD.
  • Within-pair analysis: pairs whose mean absolute feature difference reached at least 1 SD were treated as distinctive. Most pairs showed mixed directional effects across feature dimensions.
  • Availability: data and analysis outputs are released at github.com/priscapiccirilli/Met-Lit-Contrast.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/29k8t89grr9b

@inproceedings{piccirilli2026floating,
  title = {{Floating or Suggesting Ideas? A Large-Scale Contrastive Analysis of Metaphorical and Literal Verb–Object Constructions}},
  author = {Piccirilli, Prisca and Fraser, Alexander and Walde, Sabine Schulte im},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/29k8t89grr9b},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/29k8t89grr9b}
}

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