Metaphorical Heads and Literal Dependents: Syntactic Properties of Metaphors in G erman (2025)

Abstract: In this paper we examine the way metaphors are expressed in language. Our starting hypothesis is that the two expressions that are central to metaphor – namely the metaphorical expression and the expression that represents the target of the metaphorical transfer – typically stand in a syntactic dependency relation: metaphorical heads govern literal dependents. An analysis of German sermons with 30k words confirms that the hypothesis applies in 67% of the cases. 10% show the reverse relationship and in 23% there is a common ancestor.

## introduction according to lakoff and johnson (1980), metaphor is a basic cognitive phenomenon in which a (simpler) concept is used to make another (more complex) concept comprehensible. the two concepts come from different domains, typically the simpler concept is more concrete, more physical, and the more complex concept is more abstract. in our work, we are interested in the way metaphors are expressed in language (and we refer to metaphorically-used expressions also as "metaphors"). the transfer from one domain to another results in a semantic "clash" typical of metaphors, in which semantically (actually) incompatible expressions collide. (1) and ( 2 ) are examples of this: völker 'peoples' is normally not a possible attribute of meer 'sea' (see the highlighted expressions in the english translation). similarly, an (abstract) soul cannot be nourished. following the terminology of lakoff and johnson (1980), we refer to the semantic domain of the metaphorical, transferred expression (sea; full) as the source domain and the semantic domain into which it is transferred (i.e. the domains of peoples; soul) as the target domain. we call the corresponding expressions source-domain and target-domain expressions, or source and target expressions for short. if a source expression is transferred, this means that suitable properties of it are transferred to the target expression. for example, in (1) this could be the property of the sea to be composed of countless individual parts (the waves) that are difficult to distinguish. 'every face in the sea of peoples' could then mean: 'every face in the anonymous, indistinguishable mass of peoples'. the transferred property is called tertium comparationis, which is sometimes explicitly mentioned in the text, but often has to be inferred by the listener. (1) could be reformulated as follows to make the tertium comparationis explicit: the peoples are like the sea, insofar as individual faces are as indistinguishable as individual waves. this paper examines the syntactic properties of metaphors in german. the focus is on the expressions that cause the semantic clash and thus trigger the metaphorical interpretation. our hypothesis is that these expressions typically stand in specific syntactic relations: typically, the source-domain expression is the syntactic head of the target-domain expression, which functions as the dependent. this paper investigates this hypothesis using german data from sermons that has been automatically enriched with universal dependencies and additionally manually annotated for metaphors. ## related work in the framework of construction grammar (cxg), croft (1993) and especially sullivan (2009) investigated relations between source and target expressions. the generalization here is that source expressions tend to be conceptually-dependent elements, while the target expressions are conceptuallyautonomous elements -i.e. the dependencies would be exactly the opposite of what i claim. however, "dependency" is defined semantically in this framework and thus differently than in syntax: autonomous elements are those that can be conceptualized on their own. the meaning of dependent elements, on the other hand, depends on the conceptualization of another element. thus, for example, verbs are typically (semantically) dependent on their subject, which plays the role of an (obligatory) agent or actor, as in (3) (from sullivan, 2009). in any syntactic analysis, however, the relationship would be reversed: the verb would be the head and the subject the dependent. in the cxg framework, one and the same syntactic construction can come with different semantic dependencies. for instance, adjective-noun constructions can be instances of "predicating modifier constructions" (as in (4a)) or "domain constructions" (as in ( 4b )). in (4a) the adjective is considered dependent (and metaphorical), in (4b) the adjective is considered autonomous (and literal). to our knowledge, the question of the syntactic relation between the source and the target expression has not yet been systematically investigated. however, it is noticeable that many works on the analysis of metaphors focus on typical headdependent relations, in particular verb-subject (v+s), verb-object (v+o), adjective-noun (a+n) and subject-predicative (s+pred) pairs (i.e. copula constructions). ( 5 ) shows examples of these relations (from krishnakumaran and zhu, 2007). in pairings with verbs, it is the verb which is potentially metaphorical in general and the subject or object is literal. in the a+n pairs, the adjective is usually the metaphor candidate and the noun is literal (as in example (4a)). this is probably due to the fact that the adjectives were often carefully selected to be concrete, perceptible qualities and, hence, to have clear metaphorical potential. ## results the difference between ("real") metaphors and (explicit) comparisons described in section 3.3 allows us to examine the syntactic properties of both types separately. that is, the comparisons can be treated as a kind of control group for which we expect different syntactic relations than for the metaphors. however, there are also instances in the corpus where both forms have been annotated within the same chain -such annotations are problematic for our analysis. a clear distinction between the two variants is only possible on the basis of the label flag. mixed chains are then incorrectly assigned to the comparison variant. however, comparisons are much rarer in the sermons than metaphors. one reason for this is that in longer passages of comparisons we have only marked the whole block as a comparison, without further internal analysis because in such extended comparisons, the metaphorical transfer applies to discourse units rather than at the sentence level, and syntactic relations do not play a role. we nevertheless include the rare (short) chains with explicit comparisons in the analysis of syntactic properties and dependencies. we start with an overview of the distribution of the metaphor labels. then we take a closer look at the parts of speech and grammatical functions involved. finally, we look at the dependency paths between source and target expressions. here, too, there is a large discrepancy between the extremes: a sermon with 0.6% metaphor annotations vs. one with 7.7%. comparisons occur very rarely overall. this skewed distribution is also reflected in the number of chains. the chain lengths (in number of chain members) mainly range between 2 and 4. comparison chains are somewhat longer than metaphor chains. figure 4 visualizes the (percentage) distribution of mrw and anc labels (i.e. source vs. target expressions) in the individual documents, sorted according to the percentage frequency of mrw labels. for the most part, the number of mrw vs. anc is roughly comparable. however, the sermons p5634 and p5354 have a significantly higher proportion of metaphors. in p5634, for example, this is due to the fact that the image of the vine is treated and developed very prominently in the sermon (cf. example (6)), e.g. the lemma weinstock 'vine' appears a total of 4 times and frucht 'fruit' 3 times as a metaphor. conversely, anchors predominate in other sermons. typical target expressions in the sermons are religious expressions such as gott 'god' or glaube 'faith'. sermon p5151, for example, where anchors clearly predominate, is about the search for god. in a total of 8 metaphorical chains, gott is the target expression. ## conclusion the annotations in the sermons have confirmed the hypothesis that centers are typically the syntactic head of anchors. counterexamples concern attributive adjectives, which, however, occur in both constellations. the result for the adjectives corresponds to the study by sullivan (2009). a semantic analysis according to construction grammar would show whether the lemmas involved are instances of dependent vs. autonomous elements, as illustrated in example (4). in contrast to the study by sullivan (2009), however, many of the (syntactic) dependency paths between source and target expressions are considerably more complex than the rather simple cxg construction types. this indicates that the dependency relations cannot be easily mapped to the constructions investigated by sullivan (2009). it must therefore remain an open question whether an explanation in terms of cxg based on semantic properties (dependent vs. autonomous) could explain the syntactic properties. a possible purely syntactic explanation could be that a syntactic head is more prominent than a dependent and, therefore, a (deliberate) metaphorical expression, which possibly requires more processing efforts than literal expressions, can be processed more easily in such a salient position. irrespective of this, the observations from this study may be useful for the automatic recognition of metaphors, by restricting the search space.