AI RESEARCH
Floating or Suggesting Ideas? A Large-Scale Contrastive Analysis of Metaphorical and Literal Verb-Object Constructions
arXiv CS.CL
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ArXi:2604.08275v1 Announce Type: new Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain limited, especially for near-synonymous expressions. We analyze 297 English verb-object pairs (e.g., float idea vs. suggest idea) in ~2M corpus sentences, examining their contextual usage. Using five NLP tools, we extract 2,293 cognitive and linguistic features capturing affective, lexical, syntactic, and dis.