This study delves into the conceptual metaphors of depression used in the SANE UK community by both psychiatric professionals and patients who suffer from depressive disorder. By constructing a corpus of news, comments, and blogs in SANE and following the MIPVU procedure, this study discovers significant differences between the two groups regarding the use of depression metaphors. The results show that professionals apply depression metaphors with more rationality, whereas patients commonly use them to express deep emotions related to the disorder. In addition, the study reveals that metaphors conveying either positive or negative themes may contribute to the establishment of a constructive and supportive community. The major implication of this study lies in that mutual online interaction should be encouraged between professionals and patients.
We analyze the use of similes in the QuakeBox corpus, a unique longitudinal corpus of retold earthquake stories recorded seven years apart following the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake to investigate how the narration of extreme experiences changes over time. We distinguish between "distanced" similes that evoke a mediated or emotional experience and "direct" similes that describe a concrete or embodied experience. Linking these simile types to specific topics within the earthquake narratives, we analyze the source and targets used and examine whether this usage changes in retellings. We found the total number of similes used remained relatively consistent over time, as did the proportions of direct and distanced similes. Some source domains were prominent, notably war and movie/tv, but speakers often varied according to which specific simile they used, suggesting that it is particular functional characteristics of similes that persist over time rather than mappings. Building on prior work about similative scales of experience, we find that the direct and distanced simile types represent two distinct rhetorical strategies used to communicate the strangeness and intensity of a disaster and we highlight their distinctive characteristics.
This paper studies the relation between metaphor use and its linguistic and extralinguistic contexts. We propose a novel computational method, using token-level distributional semantic models and cluster analysis, to identify different metaphorical "senses" of a lexical item (e.g. cascade as 'a sequence of events, each causing the next' versus 'a diagonally flowing array of matter') and validate it qualitatively on a large corpus of American English fiction and newspaper texts (approximately 100 million words each). Next, we use the identified sense clusters to study how metaphor use varies as a function of extralinguistic context, in this case: genre. In a regression analysis, we model the genre bias of the sense clusters on the basis of three factors motivated by accounts of the interaction between metaphor and genre, namely sense concreteness, fixedness, and valence. Studying the metaphorical senses of 45 lexical items from the source domains of landscape and weather, we find that newspaper-biased senses involve more abstract target domains than fiction-biased ones. These results show that understanding the relation between linguistic contexts and metaphorical senses can support insight in usage variation across extralinguistic contexts, and, more broadly, that computational methods allow for novel ways to study the context-dependent nature of metaphor use.
Emotions are inherently dynamic processes, often conceptualized through metaphors that convey movement and transformation, such as "anger rose" or "love blossomed." Previous research has centered on metaphorical cross-domain mappings of emotion nouns, but how those mappings differ across successive phases of an emotional experience remains largely unexplored. This study addresses this gap by analyzing metaphorical expressions in corpora to reveal the dynamic nature of emotional conceptualization. Adopting a "related-event approach," we investigate emotion nouns in Japanese and English corresponding to nine emotions (LOVE, FEAR, ANGER, SADNESS, HAPPINESS, PRIDE, SURPRISE, LUST, and SHAME). Examining metaphorical expressions that depict a sequence of mental movements - emergence, existence, intensification, and revelation - as well as their source concepts, we show that emotion metaphors differ significantly across these phases: Japanese tends to emphasize emergence and revelation, whereas English favors existence and intensification. Our findings shed light on the interaction of typological, cognitive, and cultural factors in shaping emotion concepts and provide a more fine-grained understanding of emotion dynamics across different languages. Future research could further illuminate other dynamic aspects of emotion, such as duration and variability, by using time-series data on emotion expressions.
In the present study, we examined the role of comic styles in mediating the relationship between personality traits and the use of verbal irony/sarcasm. We tested a group of 848 participants from the UK, Canada, and the USA with the Comic Style Markers (CSM) and the Sarcasm Self-Report Scale (SSS). We found that comic styles significantly influence how personality traits such as neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to experience/intellect affect the use of sarcasm and irony. These results suggest that the connection between personality and humor use is complex, with comic styles altering the direct influence of personality traits. By showing how specific comic styles can amplify or reduce the effects of personality on humor use, our study challenges the straightforward linkage of personality traits to humor styles.
