Can we Operationalize Conceptual Metaphor Cross-Lingually?

Abstract

The conceptual nature of metaphorical expression is a long-discussed phenomenon, highly investigated by linguists, psychologists, translators, and philosophers, amongst others. In theoretical work, distinctions are made between conceptual metaphors (a phenomenon of human cognition) and linguistic metaphors (their concrete realizations in language), while most computational approaches have only addressed the latter. In the age of massive language models, metaphor and other phenomena of figurative speech are earning new attention as more and more textual analyses are built on top of neural-networking tools that do not necessarily make a distinction between the lexicalization of a concept and the concept itself. Hence, an investigation of conceptual metaphor using a more linguistics-driven perspective is of much importance.

In this work, we investigate the conceptuality of metaphoric expressions across two languages utilizing a parallel corpus of news commentaries from the web. We assume that a conceptual metaphor is represented by many instances of linguistic metaphors. This idea presupposes linguistic metaphor as an operationalization of conceptual metaphor. We perform several tests on how metaphors are translated between the languages, to assess whether distinct lexicalizations of a metaphor form conceptual clusters, and whether the usage of words in a metaphorical context is distinguishable from their usage in literal contexts.

We find that we are able to group linguistic metaphors in one language into semantically related sets by clustering their translations in another language. We argue that these semantically related sets constitute an operationalization of conceptual metaphors. In English, the clusters are formed by fewer, but more diverse lexelts (linguistic types), while in German we find more and bigger clusters composed primarily of derivatives and compounds. We also find that when a lexelt is translated similarly in unannotated instances to known metaphoric usages, then its contextual sense tends to be figurative as well.