Verb Metaphors as Analogies: Patterns of Meaning Change and the Role of Structure-Mapping in Comprehension

King, Daniel C

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-0s3p-7e91

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Verb Metaphors as Analogies: Patterns of Meaning Change and the Role of Structure-Mapping in Comprehension

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Metaphor is an important and pervasive phenomenon in language and cognition. The vast majority of psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on noun metaphors (e.g., That surgeon is a butcher; That lawyer is a shark), while relatively little has investigated the processing of verb metaphors (e.g., The car limped down the road, The lizard worshipped). The dearth of work in this area is unfortunate, as there is evidence that verbs are used metaphorically more frequently than nouns. The goal of this dissertation is to bridge that gap by producing a more thorough characterization of the nature of verb metaphor than is currently present in the literature. This research comprises two main lines of investigation: (1) describing the phenomena of verb metaphor (i.e., what patterns of meaning change occur when people interpret verb metaphors, as evidenced by their paraphrases), and (2) investigating the cognitive processes underlying comprehension that drives this behavior. In Chapter 1, we demonstrate the verb mutability effect, showing that people strongly prefer to interpret semantically-strained intransitive sentences (sentences where the verb is paired with an unexpected noun type) like The motor complained by changing the meaning of the verb while preserving the meaning of the noun (e.g., The engine made a strange sound). In Chapter 2, we delineate this pattern more specifically by showing that verbs follow a minimal subtraction pattern of meaning change, wherein the verb changes meaning only as far as necessary to accommodate the paired noun, preferentially altering domain-specific meaning components before more domain-general, abstract ones. In Chapter 3, we propose and test a novel process account of verb metaphor comprehension: that they are understood as analogical comparisons between the event denoted by the verb and an event activated by the noun, processed via structure-mapping. We aim to show that viewing verb metaphor as a species of analogy serves to account for both the phenomena of verb metaphor described in Chapters 1 and 2, as well as connecting more broadly to findings from the analogical reasoning literature and language evolution.

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