Unparalleled Creativity in Metaphor (and Analogy)

1. Unparalleled Creativityin Metaphor(and Analogy) John Barnden, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK Take-Home Message re Handling Creativity within Metaphorical Expression • Creative metaphorical wording, going beyond existing mappings, can often be processed • without creating new source/target mappings to handle the unmapped elements, • even when it is crucial for the meaning of the utterance. • This is a liberating point, easing the task of accounting for creativity within metaphorical wording. … including the case of non-verbal, e.g. pictorial, metaphor • Eases the task of accounting for, e.g., • creative pictorial metaphor. Take-Home Message re Non-(Grand-)Creativity in the View of the Target • So, the creativity in the wording is often not paralelled in the target and • creative metaphorical wording often DOESN’T give grandly creative new view of the target. • Instead, it can exert fine and subtle control over what is transferred by already-known mappings • and can express unusual (rather than “creative”) situations in the target domain. • (The resulting message may be much more difficult to express without the metaphor.) Similarly: Take-Home Message re Analogy • Some creative parts of analogical sources do not have creative parallels in the target, • but instead serve to (creatively) control how other parts of the analogy fit with the target.

2. NON-PARALLELED but CRUCIAL CREATIVITY in wording: example 1 “I don’t think strings are attached. If there are any they’re made ofnylon—I can’tsee them.” source elements PARALLELED: The strings Their attachment Physical seeing DIFFICULTY (of seeing) THEIR PARALLELS IN TARGET: Behaviour-affecting constraints The application of those constraints Abstract noticing DIFFICULTY (of abstract noticing) source elements NOT PARALLELED: The nylon. Being made of. Translucency. But the non-paralleled nylon and translucency derived from it are still CRUCIAL through implying the DIFFICULTY. NON-PARALLELED but CRUCIALCREATIVITY: example 2 “[w]hen Jackie expressed doubts about [Phil], I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sicklykittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat-flaps which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.” source elements NOT PARALLELED: The cat-ness of the doubts and grievances. Their tininess, sickliness, sturdiness, healthiness [ask me: complex point] The cat-flaps. The deliberateness of the cats’ wandering. One DERIVED source element that IS paralleled: The NON-deliberateness of the wandering on the speaker’s part. This non-deliberateness is a rich inference from the nature of cats and cat-flaps, and ALTGHOUGH NOT PARALLELED still has a CRUCIAL EFFECT on the meaning.

3. ATT-Meta Approach to Metaphor Understanding Other creativity-supporting aspects of ATT-Meta: • Transfer steps as just one type of reasoning step: • arbitrary intertwining • View-Neutral Mapping Adjuncts [see paper] • Metaphor Compounding • No actual reliance on “domains” • Reverse Transfer (target-to-source): • Escapes from assuming per-sentence understanding Direct Meaning of Utterance (lexico-compositional) rich inference Something Inferred using (largely) source-domain knowledge Something Inferred using (largely) source-domain knowledge Something Inferred using (largely) source-domain knowledge rich inference Something about the target scenario Transfer actions Something Inferred using (largely) source-domain knowledge Something about the target scenario Something about the target scenario