What is it about?
In this article, two levels of meaning are defined for the vehicle of a metaphor. The first level is the abstract representation or deep representation, which includes one or at most several salient semantic features. This is the metaphorical meaning of vehicle, which might be shared by a set of words with different degrees of typicality. The second level of meaning is the surface representation or literal meaning. This level includes a large number of semantic features. Therefore, metaphorical meaning includes one or at most several very salient semantic aspects, while literal meaning includes a large number of semantic features.
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Why is it important?
Looking at the processes involved in comprehension from a mathematical perspective is one of the best channels through which cognition, particularly language cognition, can be described.
Perspectives
In this article, two major theories of metaphor comprehension, structure-mapping and class-inclusion, are looked at from an algebraic perspective. Then, metaphorical meaning (abstract representation) and literal meaning (concrete representation) are described within the same mathematical framework.
Mr Omid Khatin Zadeh
Shahid Chamran University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Abstract and concrete representations in structure-mapping and class-inclusion, Cognitive Linguistic Studies, December 2015, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/cogls.2.2.07kha.
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