Verifying Claims About Metaphors with Large-Scale Automatic Metaphor Identification (2024)

Abstract: There are several linguistic claims about situations where words are more likely to be used as metaphors.However, few studies have sought to verify such claims with large corpora.This study entails a large-scale, corpus-based analysis of certain existing claims about verb metaphors, by applying metaphor detection to sentences extracted from Common Crawl and using the statistics obtained from the results.The verification results indicate that the direct objects of verbs used as metaphors tend to have lower degrees of concreteness, imageability, and familiarity, and that metaphors are more likely to be used in emotional and subjective sentences.

## introduction a metaphor is a figurative expression without a direct simile. such expressions appear frequently in all kinds of documents, and there have been numerous studies on metaphors. in the field of cognitive linguistics, the most representative work is that of @xcite . they emphasize that metaphor is not just a rhetorical device, but a significant function that largely reflects human cognition. consider the following examples. in these examples, terms associated with war, such as attack and win are used in relation to the concept of argument. such metaphors are used because the concept of argument includes elements of winning and losing, as well as the strategic use of tactics for both offense and defense. by using metaphor, one can understand the abstract concept of argument by relating it to the more concrete concept of war. lakoff and johnson contended that the fundamental nature of metaphor lies in the understanding of one concept through another, and they asserted that metaphor is at the core of human cognition. they called this cognitive function "conceptual metaphor," which has had significant influence in the field of linguistics. as a result, metaphor has emerged as a crucial topic within cognitive linguistics, giving rise to numerous claims. however, most existing studies discuss each claim in terms of a small number of examples, whereas few such studies verify claims by analyzing a large corpus. hence, this study attempts to verify certain claims about metaphors by leveraging natural language processing techniques and a large corpus. nabeshima @xcite argues that the source domain is concrete, is easily described, and involves concrete experiences, whereas the target domain is abstract, is difficult to describe, and involves less physically concrete experiences. for example, while the argument in (2) and the battle in (3) are both direct objects of the verb win, argument, which is used as a metaphor, is less concrete, less imageable, and less familiar. such properties have already been exploited for metaphor identification in natural language processing @xcite @xcite . in this study, regarding the above claims by @xcite and @xcite , we leveraged a large corpus and sought to verify five claims about metaphors which are listed in ## conclusion in this paper, we have sought to verify existing claims about metaphors by using a large corpus. specifically, we examined three claims related to conceptual metaphors and two claims related to the connections between metaphors and the strength of emotional polarity and subjectivity. as a result, we found that the direct objects of verbs used as metaphors tend to have lower degrees of concreteness, imageability, and familiarity, and that metaphors are more likely to be used in emotional and subjective sentences.