A corpus-based analysis of context effects on metaphor comprehension

This article describes our attempts to shed light on the relationship between laboratorybased research on the effects of context on metaphor and the nature of metaphor as it occurs in naturally occurring text. The specific hypothesis underlying this work is that the facilitation and inhibition effects observed in laboratory subjects reflect the patterns of co-occurrence of various kinds of contexts with metaphoric language in the environment. We take a three part approach to exploring this hypothesis: a rational analysis of the notion of a context effect, an empirical corpus-based effort to fill out that rational analysis, and a reconsideration of the pertinent psycholinguistic results with respect to that analysis. Finally, we present a proposal for a mechanistic model that is in accord with the results of our analysis. 2 1 Introduction A wide variety of results from psycholinguistic research over the last several decades have shown that context has a strong effect on the ...