Floating or Suggesting Ideas? A Large-Scale Contrastive Analysis of Metaphorical and Literal Verb-Object Constructions
2026-04-09 • Computation and Language
Computation and Language
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how metaphors and literal language differ in everyday verb-object pairs like 'float idea' versus 'suggest idea' using about 2 million sentences. They analyzed many features such as word emotion, sentence structure, and word frequency. They found that literal uses tend to be more common and regular in structure, while metaphors are often more vivid and emotionally charged. However, these differences vary a lot depending on the specific expression, meaning there is no single clear pattern that always separates metaphors from literal language. Their work helps us better understand how metaphors work in language by looking at many examples and features.
MetaphorLiteral languageVerb-object pairsLexical frequencyAffective loadImageabilitySyntactic structureDiscourse analysisNatural language processing (NLP)Construction specificity
Authors
Prisca Piccirilli, Alexander Fraser, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Abstract
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 discourse-level properties. We address: (i) whether features differ between metaphorical and literal contexts (cross-pair analysis), and (ii) whether individual VO pairs diverge internally (within-pair analysis). Cross-pair results show literal contexts have higher lexical frequency, cohesion, and structural regularity, while metaphorical contexts show greater affective load, imageability, lexical diversity, and constructional specificity. Within-pair analyses reveal substantial heterogeneity, with most pairs showing non-uniform effects. These results suggest no single, consistent distributional pattern that distinguishes metaphorical from literal usage. Instead, differences are largely construction-specific. Overall, large-scale data combined with diverse features provides a fine-grained understanding of metaphor-literal contrasts in VO usage.