# Features of Perceived Metaphoricity on the Discourse Level: Abstractness and Emotionality

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08939 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08939/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Learning and Evaluating Emotion Lexicons for 91 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05672/) (2020)
- [Emotion Representation Mapping for Automatic Lexicon Construction (Mostly) Performs on Human Level](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08890/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [What Drives the Use of Metaphorical Language? Negative Insights from Abstractness, Affect, Discourse Coherence and Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11113/) (2022)
- [Unveiling the Mystery of Visual Attributes of Concrete and Abstract Concepts: Variability, Nearest Neighbors, and Challenging Categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11657/) (2024)
- [Topic Modelling of Swedish Newspaper Articles about Coronavirus: a Case Study using Latent Dirichlet Allocation Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03029/) (2023)
- [Computational Approaches to the Detection of Lesser-Known Rhetorical Figures: A Systematic Survey and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16674/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Research on metaphorical language has shown ties between abstractness and emotionality with regard to metaphoricity; prior work is however limited to the word and sentence levels, and up to date there is no empirical study establishing the extent to which this is also true on the discourse level. This paper explores which textual and perceptual features human annotators perceive as important for the metaphoricity of discourses and expressions, and addresses two research questions more specifically. First, is a metaphorically-perceived discourse more abstract and more emotional in comparison to a literally-perceived discourse? Second, is a metaphorical expression preceded by a more metaphorical/abstract/emotional context than a synonymous literal alternative? We used a dataset of 1,000 corpus-extracted discourses for which crowdsourced annotators (1) provided judgements on whether they perceived the discourses as more metaphorical or more literal, and (2) systematically listed lexical terms which triggered their decisions in (1). Our results indicate that metaphorical discourses are more emotional and to a certain extent more abstract than literal discourses. However, neither the metaphoricity nor the abstractness and emotionality of the preceding discourse seem to play a role in triggering the choice between synonymous metaphorical vs. literal expressions. Our dataset is available at https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/data/discourse-met-lit.