Verifying Claims About Metaphors with Large-Scale Automatic Metaphor Identification

Abstract

There are several linguistic claims about situations where words are more likely to be used as metaphors. However, few studies have sought to verify such claims against large corpora. This study conducts a large-scale, corpus-based analysis of claims about metaphors, by applying automatic metaphor detection to sentences extracted from Common Crawl and using the statistics obtained from the results. Specifically, we verified a total of five claims: three claims concerning the direct objects of the verb metaphors and two claims concerning emotional polarity and subjectivity. The verification results support all of the five claims and indicate that the direct objects of verbs used as metaphors tend to have lower degrees of concreteness, imageability, and familiarity, and that metaphors are more likely to be used in emotional and subjective sentences.