Computer Interpretation of Metaphoric Phrases

7Metaphoric Idioms

Idioms are very common in natural language. Good introductions to idioms are provided by Dobrovolski [6] and van der Linden [16], who includes positive definitions of idiomatic expressions. In this discussion41 the focus is solely on meta-phoric idiomatic expressions, and the application of a program such as MAP to interpret those that are modified in some other than a syntactically simple way. In contrast to the part – sentence metaphors that were the topic in the preceding chapters, the idioms considered here are metaphoric as a whole. There is thus no domain inconsistency. Rather, the basic form of the idiom is recognized through its presence as a “big word” in the conventional lexicon, if all the obligatory parts of the ...