engleski

Separating (non-)figurative weeds from wheat

While approaches developed to recognize figurative expressions in discourse widely differ with respect to their formalization, most of them aim for the identification of the figurativeness as directly as possible. There is, however, another promising starting point – to turn our back to figurative wheat and attend to non- figurative weeds first, identifying and subsequently eliminating them from further consideration. On the basis of a methodological exercise consisting of several small-scale case studies involving English and Croatian material, we claim that by approaching metaphors in a negative way we can achieve a high success rate while using considerably leaner tools. We also show that the situation with conceptual metonymies seems to be very different, i.e. searching for literal uses first and then for metonymic ones, does not lead to the same success.

metonymy, metaphor recognition, literal expression, figurative expression

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