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Metaphor as a Medium for Emotion: An Empirical Study

Summary

People often assume that metaphors carry more feeling than plain wording, but no one had measured this or shown where a metaphor's emotional charge comes from. The authors study verb metaphors, the most frequent type, and test two hypotheses. Hypothesis 1 holds that a verb used metaphorically is more emotional than a literal substitute in the same context. Hypothesis 2 holds that a verb's metaphorical sense is more emotional than its own literal sense used in a literal context. They took example sentences for verb senses from WordNet and had CrowdFlower workers label each usage as metaphorical or literal. They then built single instances and instance pairs, which annotators rated for emotion both individually and comparatively. Both hypotheses were confirmed: on average, metaphorical usages are significantly more emotional than literal ones. Metaphors also outscore the literal sense of the same verb. The authors take this to mean the emotion is not simply inherited from the source domain but emerges from combining source and target. The released dataset supports work on metaphor processing, sentiment analysis and regular polysemy.

Key points

  • Data: 1639 WordNet senses of 440 verbs were annotated for metaphoricity via CrowdFlower. About 38% of these senses were judged metaphorical, which the authors cite as evidence that the metaphorical/literal split is a major form of regular polysemy.
  • Hypothesis 1 data: 342 instances, organised into 171 metaphor–literal paraphrase pairs that share the same context. The metaphorical uses are paired with human-validated literal paraphrases.
  • Hypothesis 2 data: 460 instances, 355 marked pairs and 629 unmarked pairs that contrast metaphorical and literal senses of the same verb.
  • Annotation: four questionnaires were used:
    • metaphorical vs. literal;
    • which instance is more metaphorical;
    • emotional vs. not;
    • which instance is more emotional.
  • Outcome and availability: both hypotheses were supported for verb metaphors. The authors call for joint models of metaphor and emotion, and all annotated files are freely available from saifmohammad.com.

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

Cited by

112 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 110 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/s16-2003

@inproceedings{mohammad2016metaphor,
  title = {{Metaphor as a Medium for Emotion: An Empirical Study}},
  author = {Mohammad, Saif and Shutova, Ekaterina and Turney, Peter},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/s16-2003},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/s16-2003}
}

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