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Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language
Edited by Annalisa Baicchi
[Figurative Thought and Language 9] 2020
► pp. 45–70

Separating (non-)figurative weeds from wheat

| University of Osijek
| ELTE, Budapest
| University of Rijeka

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.

Keywords: figurative expression, literal expression, metaphor recognition, metonymy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Some approaches to the recognition, identification and extraction of figurative expressions
  • 3.Turning our back to figurative wheat and attending to non-figurative weeds first: Why and how?
  • 4.A brief note on metonymies
  • 5.Concluding remarks and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.9.02brd
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