Kathleen Ahrens

Functional MRI of conventional and anomalous metaphors in Mandarin Chinese

This study looks at whether conventional and anomalous metaphors are processed in different locations in the brain while being read when compared with a literal condition in Mandarin Chinese. We find that conventional metaphors differ from the literal condition with a slight amount of increased activation in the right inferior temporal gyrus. In addition, when the anomalous metaphor condition is compared with the literal condition, increased activation occurs bilaterally in the frontal and temporal gyri. Lastly, the comparison between the anomalous and conventional metaphor conditions shows bilateral activation in the middle frontal gyrus and the precentral gyrus, and right-hemisphere activation in the superior frontal gyrus. Left hemisphere activation is found in the inferior frontal gyrus and fusiform gyrus. The left hemisphere activation in the frontal and temporal gyri point to the recruitment of traditional language-based areas for anomalous metaphor sentences, while the right-hemisphere activation found suggests that remote associations are being formed. In short, our study supports the idea that metaphors are not a homogenous type of figurative language and that distinguishing between different types of metaphors will advance theories of language comprehension.

Individuals, kinds and events: classifier coercion of nouns

This paper challenges the traditional view that nominal classifiers classify individuals. Instead, we suggest that classifiers coerce nouns to refer to kinds and events as well as to individuals. This finding argues against the view that nouns refer only to entities, and suggests that classifiers do not simply agree with a noun, but instead coerce a particular meaning from it. Moreover, the Mandarin classifier system creates a taxonomic system involving events, kinds and individuals respectively. Within each classifier type an independent classification system of the collocating noun type is created. These findings are important first because they emphasize that the understanding of the semantics of nouns involves more than simple reference to an individual entity. Second, it is the first time that the previously abstract semantic distinctions among kinds, individuals and events, as well as within kinds and within events, have been found to be instantiated in a particular system of a natural language grammar, namely, the classifier system.

The Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics: From Semantics to Argument Structure

In this paper, we set forth a theory of lexical knowledge. We propose two types of modules: event structure modules and role modules, as well as two sets of attributes: event-internal attributes and role-internal attributes, which are linked to the event structure module and role module, respectively. These module-attribute semantic representations have associated grammatical consequences. Our data is drawn from a comprehensive corpus-based study of Mandarin Chinese verbal semantics, and four particular case studies are presented.

Towards a Representation of Verbal Semantics-An Approach Based on Near-Synonyms

In this paper we propose using the distributional differences in the syntactic patterns of near-synonyms to deduce the relevant components of verb meaning. Our method involves determining the distributional differences in syntactic patterns, deducing the semantic features from the syntactic phenomena, and testing the semantic features in new syntactic frames. We determine the distributional differences in syntactic patterns through the following five steps: First, we search for all instances of the verb in the corpus. Second, we classify each of these instances into its type of syntactic function. Third, we classify each of these instances into its argument structure type. Fourth, we determine the aspectual type that is associated with each verb. Lastly, we determine each verbs sentential type. Once the distributional differences have been determined, then the relevant semantic features are postulated. Our goal is to tease out the lexical semantic features as the explanation, and as the motivation of the syntactic contrasts.

Politics, gender and conceptual metaphors

List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Analyzing Conceptual Metaphors in Political Language K.Ahrens PART I: GENDER AND CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS IN POLITICAL SPEECHES Metaphor, Politics and Gender: A Case Study from Germany V.Koller & E.Semino Metaphor, Politics, and Gender: A Case Study from Italy E.Semino & V.Koller Gender versus Politics: When Conceptual Models Collide K.Ahrens & S.Lee Non una Donna in Politica, ma una Donna Politica: Womens Political Language in an Italian Context G.Philip The Metaphorical Construction of Ireland E.Hidalgo Tenorio PART II: GENDER AND CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS IN POLITICAL DEBATES Metaphor and Gender in British Parliamentary Debates J.Charteris-Black Sex Differences in the Usage of Spatial Metaphors: A Case Study of Political Language A.Stefanowitsch & J.Goschler Conceptual Metaphors of Family and Home in Political Debates in the USA K.Adams PART III: WOMEN IN GENDERED CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS Women and the Body Politic: A Critical Multimodal Analysis of Metaphor in Advertising M.Lazar Power as a Conceptual Metaphor of Gender Inequality? Comparing Dutch and Spanish Politics P.Meier & E.Lombardo Gendered Metaphors of Women in Power: The Case of Hillary Clinton as Madonna, Unruly Woman, Bitch, and Witch E.Lim Index

Ambiguity Advantage Revisited: Two Meanings are Better than One When Accessing Chinese Nouns

This paper revisits the effect of lexical ambiguity in word recognition, which has been controversial as previous research reported advantage, disadvantage, and null effects. We discuss factors that were not consistently treated in previous research (e.g., the level of lexical ambiguity investigated, parts of speech of the experimental stimuli, and the choice of non-words) and report on a lexical decision experiment with Chinese nouns in which ambiguous nouns with homonymic and/or metaphorical meanings were contrasted with unambiguous nouns. An ambiguity advantage effect was obtained—Chinese nouns with multiple meanings were recognized faster than those with only one meaning. The results suggested that both homonymic and metaphorical meanings are psychologically salient semantic levels actively represented in the mental lexicon. The results supported a probability-based model of random lexical access with multiple meanings represented by separate semantic nodes. We further discuss these results in terms of lexical semantic representation and how different experimental paradigms result in different ambiguity effects in lexical access.

Participant Roles and the Processing of Verbs During Sentence Comprehension

This paper explores the nature of thematic information made available when a verb is accessed during sentence comprehension. Following Shapiro, Zurif, and Grimshaw (1987), a cross-modal lexical decision (interference) task was employed to examine whether either the number of argument structures or the number of participant (thematic) roles inherent in a verb cause an increase in processing load upon access of the verb. It was determined that there was no evidence for such an increased processing load covarying with the number of argument structures of the verb, at least for those verb types examined in this study. However, there was an increase in processing load as a direct function of the number of participant roles carried by the verb. It is concluded that the participant roles (thematic roles associated with the central meaning of the verb) are stored with the representation of a verb and are made immediately, available upon access of the verb for further processing during comprehension.

Meaning Representation and Meaning Instantiation for Chinese Nominals

The goal of this paper is to explicate the nature of Chinese nominal semantics, and to create a paradigm for nominal semantics in general that will be useful for natural language processing purposes. We first point out that a lexical item may have two meanings simultaneously, and that current models of lexical semantic representation cannot handle this phenomenon. We then propose a meaning representation that deals with this problem, and also discuss how the meanings involved are instantiated. In particular we posit that in addition to the traditional notion of sense differentiation, each sense may have different meaning facets. These meaning facets are linked to their sense or to other meaning facets through one of two ways: metonymic or metonymic extension.

Chinese Word Sketch and Mapping Principles: A Corpus-Based Study of Conceptual Metaphors Using the BUILDING Source Domain

This study examines whether Mapping Principles, which govern how concrete concepts in a source domain are mapped to abstract concepts in a target domain, are realized in large-scale corpus data. In particular, we propose a frequency-based collocational approach to determine mapping principles based on the most productive mapping. In addition, in contrast to the target-domain-oriented method used in previous studies, we employ the source-domain-oriented method to search for lexical mappings from a particular source domain, i.e., BUILDING, to a number of target domains. The corpus data demonstrate that mapping principles exist in a source-target domain pairing. In addition, we found that different target domains select the source domain of BUILDING for different underlying reasons. Our study follows the lexical analysis of conceptual metaphors proposed by the Conceptual Mapping Model and helps us better understand how semantic networks of lexical words are represented in the lexicon via conceptual mappings.

Processing Conceptual Metaphors in On-Going Discourse

In this study, we investigate whether or not conceptual mappings are accessed and used in on-going discourse when people process conceptual metaphors. In particular, we postulate that the conflicting results of previous studies (Nayak & Gibbs, 1990; Glucksberg et al., 1993) may be due to either one or both of the two diverse methods employed: (1) the different task demands (a judgment task employed by the former versus a reading task employed by the latter) and (2) the distinct visual presentations of stimuli (a paragraph presentation in the former versus the line-by-line presentation in the latter). We carried out one off-line and four on-line tasks in order to examine which factors affect the access of conceptual mappings in on-going discourse. Our study supports the hypothesis that conceptual mappings exist and are accessed in on-going language processing when materials are presented in a paragraph style. We argue that the line-by-line presentation method creates an expectation for new information, and thus, does not facilitate the activation of conceptual mappings, while a paragraph presentation method allows for conceptual representations to be built and accessed, regardless of what type of task is used.