When Meaning Isn't Literal: Exploring Idiomatic Meaning Across Languages and Modalities

ArXi:2604.10787v1 Announce Type: new Idiomatic reasoning, deeply intertwined with metaphor and culture, remains a blind spot for contemporary language models, whose progress skews toward surface-level lexical and semantic cues. For instance, the Bengali idiom \textit{\foreignlanguage{bengali}{\char"0986\char"0999\char"09CD\char"0997\char"09C1 \char"09B0 \char"09AB\char"09B2 \char"099F\char"0995}} (angur fol tok, ``grapes are sour''): it encodes denial-driven rationalization, yet naive models latch onto the literal fox-and-grape imagery.