processing conventional conceptual metaphors in persian: a corpus-based psycholinguistic study

J Psycholinguist ResDOI 10.1007/s10936-014-9299-1

Processing Conventional Conceptual Metaphors inPersian: A Corpus-Based Psycholinguistic Study

Ramin Golshaie · Arsalan Golfam

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract Research on the psycholinguistic processing of conceptual metaphors has pro-duced contrasting results in recent years. There have also been criticisms that in exper-imental studies of metaphor processing, linguistic stimuli are mostly intuition-based andnot designed objectively based on the original language use data. To address theseissues, we studied the processing of conventional metaphoric expressions in Persian lan-guage using corpus data. A reading time experiment was designed to test whether con-ventional metaphoric expressions activated conceptual metaphors. A corpus of 50 mil-lion word tokens was used to study the conventional patterns of metaphoric expressionsusages and construct experimental items. Fifty five Persian speakers read a set of sce-narios containing non-conventional metaphor, conventional metaphor and non-metaphorexpressions on computer and the reading times of the following novel target sentence ineach condition were recorded by DMDX stimulus presenter program. Comparing meanreading times using one-way ANOVA revealed that reading target sentence after con-ventional metaphor scenarios had been significantly faster than non-metaphor scenar-ios, but slower than non-conventional scenarios. The results show that conventionalityhas a weakening effect on the strength of metaphoric expressions to activate conceptualmetaphors.

Keywords Metaphor comprehension · Language use · Persian · Conventionality ·Corpus linguistics

R. Golshaie (B)Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology,No. 1090, Felestin & Enqelab Ave. intersection,P.O. Box 13185-1371, 13157-3314 Tehran, Irane-mail: [email protected]

A. GolfamDepartment of Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

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Introduction

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), abbreviated here as CMT, isone of the foundational theories of cognitive science in general and cognitive linguisticsin particular which gives metaphor a unique stance in structuring human thought and cog-nition. This cognitive approach to metaphor is based on the thesis of embodied cognition(Johnson 1987) which considers the role of body and experience primary in shaping thought,meaning, and abstract concepts in human mind. In the CMT one concept, belonging to thetarget domain of metaphor and usually an abstract one, is understood in terms of anotherconcept, usually more concrete and belonging to the source domain of metaphor. When aconnection is established between source and target domains, it is said that there is a mappingbetween source and target domains. Hence according to this theory, when there is a mappingbetween domains, concepts from source domain are used to partially understand concepts oftarget domain. For example, in the expression a long time, it is said the word long belongsto the source domain of “space” which has been used to describe the abstract concept of“time”.

One of the key findings of the CMT is that systematic metaphors differ from unsystem-atic ones. For example, words like attack, position, and defend which belong to the sourcedomain of WAR, are used systematically in the domain of ARGUMENT to form the ARGU-MENT IS WAR conceptual metaphor. To quote Lakoff and Johnson (1980), “Expressionslike wasting time, attacking positions, going our separate ways, etc., are reflections of sys-tematic metaphorical concepts that structure our actions and thoughts. They are “alive” inthe most fundamental sense: they are metaphors we live by. The fact that they are conven-tionally fixed within the lexicon of English makes them no less alive” (p. 55). The systematicrelationships between metaphoric expressions have led Lakoff and Johnson to conclude thatthese metaphoric expressions have a deeper, i.e. conceptual, basis so the role of language issecondary in relation to thought. In other words, it is claimed that conceptual metaphors1

operate at the level of thought and linguistic expressions are only a realization of these mentalstructures. The claim that these conventional expressions are “no less alive” implies whenmetaphoric expressions are comprehended, the same conceptual structures underlying themare activated. However, the psychological validity of this claim has been disputed in recentdecades.

Many psychologists have attempted to investigate the psychological reality of concep-tual metaphors independently from language. The conceptual metaphors which have beenexplored in various experimental studies include TIME IS SPACE (Boroditsky 2000, 2001;Casasanto 2008; Casasanto and Henetz 2012; Casasanto et al. 2010), SIMILARITY ISCLOSENESS (Casasanto 2008), GOOD IS RIGHT/ BAD IS LEFT2 (Casasanto 2009;Casasanto and Henetz 2012), GOOD IS UP (Crawford et al. 2006), POWER IS UP (Schu-bert 2005; Giessner and Schubert 2007), INTIMACY IS WARMTH (Williams and Bargh2008), IMPORTANT IS HEAVY (Jostmann et al. 2009). These studies provide evidencethat conceptual metaphors as mental constructs are psychologically real. As an instance,Casasanto (2009) investigated the relationship between handedness and mental representa-tion of abstract concepts with negative or positive valence giving rise to GOOD IS RIGHT

1 Following the convention used in CMT research, we use the terms “linguistic metaphors” or “metaphoricexpressions” referring to linguistic realization of conceptual metaphors. “Conceptual metaphors” or “mentalmetaphors” will be used interchangeably referring to the non-linguistic cognitive structures residing in themind/brain.2 Casasanto and Henetz (2012) found that GOOD is not always conceptualized as RIGHT. Right-handers andleft-handers associated GOOD with the right and left side of their body respectively.

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metaphor. In one of the non-linguistic experiments using pencil-and-paper task, he instructedsubjects to draw an animal in one of two boxes located to the left and right side of a cartoonfigure. They were told that the cartoon figure liked certain animals and disliked others, sothey had to draw a good animal in the box they thought represented good things and badanimals in the box that represented bad things. The results showed that right-handers asso-ciated their rightward space (boxes) with good ideas (animals) and leftward space with badideas, but left-handers showed the opposite pattern. In another study, Williams and Bargh(2008) attempted to verify the psychological reality of INTIMACY IS WARMTH concep-tual metaphor. They hypothesized that experiences of physical warmth/coldness would affectfeelings of interpersonal warmth/coldness. In accordance with their hypothesis, subjects whobriefly held a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee, judged the target person as having a “warmer”personality.

However, when language comes into play and serves as the medium for studying concep-tual metaphors, we are faced with mixed results. In fact, language mediation has been resultedin contradictory findings on whether conceptual metaphors are activated during reading con-ventional metaphoric expressions. Some psycholinguistic studies have found that conceptualmetaphors are activated when idiomatic metaphoric expressions (e.g. he blew his stack) areprocessed (Gibbs et al. 1997; Gibbs and O’Brien 1990; Gong and Ahrens 2007; Nayak andGibbs 1990; Valenzuela and Soriano 2007). On the other hand, there are also studies whichsuggest conceptual metaphors are not automatically activated during metaphoric languagecomprehension (e.g. Glucksberg et al. 1993; Keysar et al. 2000). In the present study, weapproach the question of psychological reality of understanding metaphoric expressions froma corpus-based psycholinguistic perspective.

The Relevant Literature on Metaphor Processing

One of the first experimental investigations in the field of metaphor research has been to testthe predictions of the “standard pragmatic view” of metaphor processing. According to thisview (Grice 1975; Searle 1979), processing a metaphorical expression first involves accessingthe literal meaning of the expression, and then arriving at the metaphorical interpretation ifthe literal meaning is implausible. In fact since the metaphoric language is assumed to devi-ate from literal speech, reaching the metaphorical interpretation requires additional cognitiveeffort. Although some psycholinguistic studies have provided evidence against the standardpragmatic view of metaphor understanding (e.g. Gibbs 1994; Gibbs et al. 1989), recently ithas been shown that core (versus full) features of literal meaning are always activated even incontexts biased toward a metaphorical interpretation of an expression (see Rubio Fernández2007).

As an alternative to standard pragmatic model of metaphor processing, direct accessview suggests that people need not access and then reject the literal meaning of figura-tive expressions before arriving at the non-literal interpretation. For example according tothe Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH) (Giora 1997, 1999), salient meanings (be literal ormetaphoric) are accessed first during metaphor comprehension. In this model, the salienceof an expression is considered to be a function of its conventionality, familiarity, frequency,or givenness in a context. For instance, if the metaphorical meaning of an idiom is intended(the salient meaning), it is accessed directly without the need for its literal meaning (theless salient meaning) to be processed first. However, in processing novel metaphors, theliteral meaning (the salient meaning) is accessed before the intended metaphorical mean-ing (the less salient meaning) in a manner similar to standard pragmatic model. In the case

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of conventional metaphors whose literal and metaphorical meanings are equally salient,both meanings are accessed in parallel. Thus GSH appears to have reconciled the directaccess vs. standard pragmatic view of metaphor processing: depending on the salienceof different linguistic expressions, different processes (direct/sequential/parallel) may berequired.

Another related line of research on metaphor processing which is discussed mainly withinthe CMT literature, has focused on the psychological reality of processing metaphoric expres-sions. This is an important area mainly because, as noted earlier, there are inconsistent resultsobtained from studying psychological reality of conceptual metaphors (independent of lan-guage) and conceptual metaphoric expressions.

For example Boroditsky (2000) in a series of experimental tasks attempted to find out ifthe abstract domain of TIME is shaped by the more concrete experiential domain of SPACE.She found that the domains of space and time share conceptual structure, i.e. representationsbelonging to the domain of space are used to understand concepts related to time. For example,it was found that in the expression “the meeting originally scheduled for next Wednesdayhas been moved forward two days” the concept of time is understood in relation to movingforward/backward along a path and depending on whether we take an “ego-moving” or“time-moving” perspective, the meeting date could be ambiguous between Friday or Monday.However, she found no evidence that spatial representations were “necessary” to understandtime-related concepts.

Kemmerer (2005) explores if the TIME IS SPACE metaphor actively influences modernadults understanding of English prepositional meanings. Since in English (and other lan-guages worldwide) the same prepositions are used to describe both temporal and spatialrelationships, it is a suitable area to study Space–Time correspondences. He conducted aseries of experiments on four brain-damaged subjects with left perisylvian lesions to studytheir understanding of English spatial-temporal prepositions. Kemmerer, based on the evi-dence from focal brain lesions, states that in patients with perisylvian lesions concrete andabstract concepts can be disrupted independently of each other. Consequently, this is con-sidered an interesting area to test whether prepositions with spatial (concrete) and tempo-ral (abstract) meanings can be dissociated. He found that two subjects failed a test thatassessed knowledge of spatial meanings of prepositions, but passed a test that assessedknowledge of the corresponding temporal meanings of the same prepositions. The othertwo subjects showed the opposite dissociation. These findings were interpreted as support-ing the view that spatial and temporal meanings of prepositions linked by virtue of TIMEIS SPACE metaphor, can be represented and processed independently of each other in thebrain.

The dissociation between source and target domains of a metaphor has been explained bythe evolutionary process of conventionalization in Career of Metaphor hypothesis (Bowdleand Gentner 2005). It is argued that dead metaphors whose source and target domains havelost their connection, is the end product of this process. This model maintains that metaphoricexpressions are understood by structure-mapping between source and target domain represen-tations. However, as metaphors are conventionalized by frequent use, the mode of processingshifts from comparison to categorization.

In addition to offline studies of metaphor comprehension, there has been plenty of researchusing online methods (such as lexical decision task, measuring reading time, ERP, fMRI, etc.)to explore if the conceptual metaphors are activated during comprehending a metaphoricexpression. For example, Gibbs et al. (1997) using a lexical decision task found that read-ing an idiomatic expression at the end of a story, facilitates deciding between the follow-ing word/non-word when the word is related to the underlying conceptual metaphor of the

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idiomatic expression (e.g. word “heat” is related to the idiom “blow one’s stack” as a realiza-tion of the conceptual metaphor ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER). Theyinterpreted this finding as supporting the idea that conceptual metaphors are activated duringreading metaphoric expressions.

Glucksberg et al. (1993) replicated Nayak and Gibbs’ (1990) off-line study and also usedan on-line comprehension task to study activation of conceptual metaphors. In the off-linetask subjects had to choose an appropriate final sentence to complete a scenario containingmetaphoric expressions. Similar to Nayak and Gibbs’ findings, it was found that subjectschose the idiomatic expression that was conceptually consistent with the expressions usedin the scenarios. However, by collecting reading times in on-line task, Glucksberg et al.found that consistent idiomatic expressions had no reading advantage over inconsistent ones.Keysar et al. (2000) also conducted a series of reading time experiments on the process-ing of metaphoric expressions (mostly taken from Lakoff and Johnson 1980) to test thehypothesis that conventional metaphoric expressions activate conceptual metaphors. Theirfindings show that conventional metaphoric expressions do not activate source domain repre-sentations. They conclude that conventional metaphors are dead metaphors and their mean-ing is not determined by the conceptual metaphors which initially motivated their originalmeaning.

In an event-related potential (ERP) study, Lai et al. 2009) studied neural mechanismsof understanding conventional and novel conceptual metaphors. In this study, conventionalmetaphors which were defined as familiar metaphors were created on the basis of conceptualmetaphor theory. Novel metaphors were unfamiliar and harder to interpret. The authorscompared ERPs elicited by the same target word used at the end of literal, conventionalmetaphorical, novel metaphorical, and anomalous sentences. The results of the study did notsupport predictions of the graded salience hypothesis: conventional metaphors which werejudged as salient and familiar as literal sentences by subjects still elicited the same size N400ERP as novel metaphors which subjects had judged to be non-salient. According to thesefindings, although understanding conventional metaphors require processing effort, the effortis lesser compared to processing novel metaphors. Overall the authors interpret the findingsas consistent with Career of Metaphor hypothesis.

In neurolinguistic research, there has also been much interest to investigate the brainlateralization of metaphor processing. Generally it’s been suggested that the right hemisphereplays a crucial role in the comprehension of figurative language, in particular metaphors(e.g. Bottini et al. 1994). However, there are studies which have found no evidence of righthemisphere involvement during metaphor processing (see Lee and Dapretto 2006; Rapp etal. 2007, 2004). One possible reason for obtaining opposite results has been shown to be thedifferences in familiarity of metaphors (e.g. Mashal et al. 2005; Schmidt et al. 2007; Schmidtand Seger 2009). This means that conventional and novel metaphors may be processed indifferent parts of the brain; familiar or conventional metaphors do not recruit right hemispherewhereas unfamiliar or novel metaphors do.

One important aspect common to the research reviewed above which could have been thesource of contradictory results, is that they seem to have used no systematic method to oper-ationalize conventionality or familiarity of metaphors. For example, Rapp et al. (2004, 2007)who found no right hemisphere role in processing unfamiliar metaphors, defined unfamiliarmetaphors as those that did not appear in an internet search. However, it is not clear whetherinternet search could be an appropriate criterion to distinguish familiar from unfamiliarmetaphors. On the other hand, the majority of studies have based the familiarity/unfamiliaritydistinction of metaphors on human judgments or intuition. However, in corpus linguistics ithas been shown that one’s intuitions, realized as invented or elicited expressions from infor-

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mants, about language could be unreliable predictor of natural language use (Sinclair 1991).In metaphor research this means that conventionality of metaphoric expressions cannot reli-ably be determined by one’s intuition because as Deignan (2005, 110) notes, “both intuitiveand elicited data … seem likely to produce innovative rather than conventional metaphors”.Thus it is possible that a researcher assumes his/her experimental items are conventional orfamiliar metaphoric expressions, but based on corpus evidence it would turn out they arenon-conventional usages. For example, Deignan (2008) discusses some metaphoric expres-sions used in psycholinguistics experiments. She notes that the sentence He almost explodedwith anger (taken from Gibbs 1994, 18–19) is not a natural English sentence based on corpusevidence, because corpus-based studies of the metaphors related to anger and pressure showthat the use of such sentences which attribute metaphoric concepts of anger or pressure to oneindividual are very rare in the corpus. Instead, she points, anger and pressure metaphors arefrequent when they are used collectively with a group of people. In the following section wewill briefly review some corpus-based studies of metaphor, CMT in particular, to see whatevidence corpus-based method can provide in studying behavior of metaphoric expressionsin natural language use.

Language Use and Metaphor

In usage-based linguistics (see Bybee 2006, 2007, 2010), language is studied in its originalcontext of use and language corpora which collections of texts can be reliable sources oflinguistic data that show the original language use. Using corpus-based methods in study-ing conceptual metaphors is relatively recent (Deignan 2005, 2006, 2008; Steen et al. 2010;Stefanowitsch and Gries 2006; Svanlund 2007). Deignan (2005, 85) enumerates three advan-tages of corpus-based method over intuition: (1) the limitations of human memory mean thata computer is far better equipped to both store and search large amounts of text; (2) Cor-pus linguists have found that human beings are not good at describing their own languageproduction (Sinclair 1991). This seems strange; we must all have a stock of typical wordmeanings, collocations and grammatical patterns in order for us to produce natural-soundinglanguage, yet for some reason we are unable to access this knowledge out of context per-forming endlessly repetitive tasks swiftly and accurately; (3) Any one speaker will not knowall the words of their language and their meanings in use.

In a purely linguistic usage-based approach to metaphor, Deignan (2005) has studiedgrammatical, semantic and collocational properties of linguistic metaphors and has shownthat CMT cannot fully account for linguistic and semantic patterns found in metaphoricexpressions. Moreover her research findings show that some instances of linguistic metaphorsare not only rare in the corpus, but also non-conventional semantically. For example, she usesAmerican section of Bank of English corpus to study lexical items identified by Yu (1995)as realizations of ANGER IS HEAT conceptual metaphor. Deignan (2005, 95) cites thefollowing expressions that were used by Yu:

– These are inflammatory remarks.– She was doing a show burn.– He was breathing fire.– Your insincere apology has added fuel to the fire.– After the argument, Dave was smoldering for days.– Boy, am I burned up.– Smoke was pouring out of his ears.

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Deignan finds out that “while some of Yu’s linguistic metaphors are frequent, others do notoccur at all in the corpus. Inflammatory and smoldering both occur regularly with meaningsthey have in Yu’s examples but metaphorical breath/e/ed/es/ing fire occurred only once in1,000 citations of fire. Fuel and its inflections collocate with fire as a linguistic metaphorjust three times in 10,000 citations of fire… There are no instances of burned + up with themeaning of ‘be very angry’. Smoke appears within eight words either side of ears only twicein the entire American corpus, with a literal meaning in each case” (p. 95). These findingssuggest that what are considered conventional metaphors by some researchers, may turn outto be rare or nonexistent in the corpus.

Cameron and Deignan (2006) use the concept of emergence to explain the behavior ofmetaphoric expressions. They combine two methods of analyzing linguistic data: in onemethod, they analyze the continuous discourse to identify emergent forms in the rich textualcontext. In the second method, they use computer to study specific words and expressionsin various contexts. Their findings suggest that non-literal expressions with relatively fixedforms and specific semantics and pragmatics have a high frequency in their data which cannotbe accounted for by CMT.

In another corpus-based study, Svanlund (2007) has analyzed “weight”-related metaphoricexpressions in Swedish language and has concluded that the metaphoric strengths of dif-ferent metaphoric expressions belonging to the same source domain of WEIGHT arenot alike. He concludes that conceptual metaphors should be seen as cognitive tenden-cies and not systematic structures that govern the semantics of a group of lexical items.These cognitive tendencies are themselves affected by lexical conventionalization patterns.Svanlund, based on his corpus observations, predicts that conventional metaphoric expres-sions would not activate the source domain representations as strongly as novel metaphorsdo.

Sanford (2010) studies the effect of frequency of use on the representation, productivityand processing of English metaphoric expressions. He shows that frequency of use as alanguage use factor affects the representation of conceptual metaphors and that frequentlinguistic metaphors are more accessible and acceptable than infrequent ones. Sanford’sfindings, as he concludes, do not contradict the idea that conceptual metaphors are mental non-linguistic structures, but it takes a more dynamic and interactive position on humans’ cognitivesystem and conceptual metaphors, i.e. metaphoric schemata are formed and supported by theprocessing and use of metaphoric expressions and these metaphoric expressions have directinputs into the conceptual system.

One rarely discussed topic in corpus-based studies of metaphor is what is termed mixedmetaphors. Mixed metaphors are metaphoric expressions belonging to different conceptualdomains but used adjacently. Kimmel (2010) studies mixed metaphors in two British news-papers Sun and The Guardian in a 14-month period from 2004 to 2005. His findings showthat mixing metaphors in journalistic texts is very common. Based on the corpus findings, heargues that conceptual metaphors are not coherence-preserving devices operating as logicalstructures in text, but they operate at a local level.

Corpus analyses of metaphoric expressions uncover fine details of usage patterns whichare out of the reach of intuitive judgments. These usage patterns might seem trivial whenproviding linguistic evidence in support of a theory. However, when such linguistic expres-sions are used to construct materials for a psycholinguistic or behavioral experiment, usagedetails would play an indispensable role in extracting natural language usage patternswhich in return would affect the results of the behavioral task. In the present study, bymaking a methodological synthesis between psycholinguistic and corpus-based methods,we investigated the on-line processing of conventional metaphoric expressions in Persian

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and used a language corpus to extract the conventionally used expressions. We attemptedto answer the following research questions: Does processing conventional metaphoricexpressions activate conceptual metaphors? Based on the recent evidence that linguisticmetaphors like any linguistic element are governed by language use factors such as fre-quency of use, we predicted that conventional metaphoric expressions would not activatethe source domain representations of metaphor as strongly as non-conventional metaphoricexpressions.

The Experiment

In the present study, the methodology used by Keysar et al. (2000) was adopted with somemodifications for the processing of metaphoric expressions in Persian. It was a priming studyin the form of a self-paced reading task in which a group of the sentences of scenarios serveas a prime for the last target sentence. The rationale of the experiment was that reading primescenario which contains metaphoric expressions would activate source domain representa-tions. So if the target sentence is a realization of the same underlying conceptual metaphor,then the representations activated by the prime scenarios would be available to the processingof target sentence resulting in faster reading time.

Method

Participants

Fifty-five native speakers of Persian studying in Tarbiat Modares University participatedin the experiment in exchange for a gift. All the participants were graduate level studentsconsisting of 25 females and 30 males in the age range of 20–40 years. The mean age ofparticipants was 27.7 (SD = 2.8).

Materials and Design

We created nine sets of scenarios with nine different conceptual mappings underlying differ-ent sets (see “Appendices”). The conceptual mappings were selected based on CMT literature(Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1989). Lexical items which were associ-ated with the source domain of the metaphors were identified and their Persian equivalentswere also identified to be searched in Persian corpus. For example, in Lakoff and John-son (1980) expressions like attack, defense, counterattack, etc. which belong to the sourcedomain of WAR are considered linguistic realizations of the ARGUMENT IS WAR concep-tual metaphor. The Persian equivalent of these expressions together with their related wordsand synonyms were identified using a Persian thesaurus (Fararooy 2009). These expressionsserved as tentative search keywords on the web and the next step was to attest both theirliteral and metaphorical uses to confirm the existence of the underlying metaphor in Persian.Attesting literal as well as metaphorical usages of a source domain keyword was impor-tant because if only metaphorical usages were found for a keyword, it could be indicativeof a dead metaphor. Thus by checking the existence of both literal-metaphorical uses of akeyword, we would be certain that the mapping between source domain and target domainof a metaphor still exists. We used World Wide Web as a tentative corpus (Kilgarriff andGrefenstette 2003) to search the keywords. To do this, multiple keywords belonging to thesource domain of a conceptual metaphor were entered in the Google search engine and the

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Table 1 Conceptual metaphors used in the experiment and their associated source-domain keywords

Conceptual metaphors Source domain keywords

Persian English meaning

1. ARGUMENT IS WAR mozegiri “take position”

hamalaat (lafzi) “(verbal) attacks”

qaabele defaa “defendable”

2. DIFFICULTIES AREBURDENS

masooliyate sangin “heavy (responsibility)”

shaaneh khaali kardan (az masooliyat) “to shoulder (a responsibility)”

3. LIFE IS A JOURNEY enheraaf “deviate”

faraaz o nashib “up and down”

doraahi “fork (way)”

4. IDEAS ARE PLANTS shokoofayi “flourish”

shaakhehaye (elmi) “(scientific) branches”

samaraat “fruits”

5. IDEAS ARE BUILDING bipaayeh va asaas “baseless”

bar paayeh (estedlaale) zaeef “on the basis of weak (arguments)”

taqviate (paayeh) “to strengthen (base)”

6. TO BE IN A (MENTAL)STATE IS TO BE INWATER/SEA

gharq (dar motaale’e) “be drown (in thinking)”sathi “superficial”

omq bakhshidan “deepen”

7. MENTAL DAMAGE ISPHYSICAL DAMAGE

zakhme zaban zadan “to wound by tongue”

(tajrobe) dardnaak “painful (experience)”

aasib “damage”

8. ARGUMENT ISJOURNEY

seyre (bahs) “course of discussion”

samt o soo dadan “(give) direction”

residan (be tavaafoq) “arrive (to an agreement)”

9. MORALITY ISCLEANNESS

(dele) paak “clean heart”

aaloodeh (be gonaah) “sin-stained”

results were studied. The results indicated that most of the metaphoric expressions in Lakoffand Johnson (1980) were also found in Persian language confirming the existence of theircorresponding conceptual mappings in the Iranian culture.

Each set of scenarios was written in three different versions corresponding to threeconditions of the experiment: conventional version, non-conventional version, and non-metaphorical paraphrase version. In the conventional version, all the metaphoric expres-sions were conventional linguistic metaphors. In order to construct conventional metaphoricexpressions, we selected 2–3 metaphoric keywords of the source domain of the metaphor (seeTable 1) and searched them in a sample subcorpus consisting of 50 million word tokens. Thissample subcorpus was derived from the larger Hamshahri 2 corpus3 (AleAhmad et al. 2009),a standard Persian text collection consisting of about 140 million word tokens collected from

3 More information available at http://ece.ut.ac.ir/dbrg/hamshahri.

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http://ece.ut.ac.ir/dbrg/hamshahri


Fig. 1 The procedure for corpus-based analysis of extracting conventional metaphoric expressions

years 1996 to 2007. Hamshahri4 is the Iranian daily newspaper covering political, economic,cultural, social, etc. news topics.

In order to spot conventional usage patterns of metaphoric expressions in the corpus, firstwe had to operationalize the concept of conventionality. According to Lakoff and Johnson(1980), “[t]hese expressions, like all other words and phrasal lexical items in the language, arefixed by convention” (p. 54). Fixed expressions can be extracted from corpora by calculatingcollocations, frequently co-occurring words. The collocates (frequent neighboring words) ofthe keywords were calculated in a window span of ±3 words using AntConc corpus software(Anthony 2011) and the most significant ones which appeared to be relevant to the sourcedomain of metaphor were sorted according to their frequency. To calculate the significanceof collocations we used an information-theoretic measure called Mutual Information (MI)which can be calculated by AntConc software. We considered those collocations significantthat had a MI score of >4 and minimum frequency of 6. Then we sorted the significantcollocates based on their frequency and selected top 10 significant ones. After obtaining thesignificant collocates, they were concordanced together with the keywords in order to accesstheir larger context and uncover more patterns if there were any. The usage patterns revealedby these searches were used in phrasing the conventional version scenarios. The complete

4 http://www.hamshahrionline.ir.

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http://www.hamshahrionline.ir


Table 2 A translated example item for the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor written in three versions

ARGUMENT IS WAR

Non-conventional

Saeed and Mohsen always disagree with each other when arguing. They build trenches against each otherfrom the beginning. Mohsen remains on his argumental trench against Saeed’s verbal missile attack. But aftera while he realizes he cannot defend his trench against bombardment

Conventional

Saeed and Mohsen always disagree with each other when arguing. They take position against each other fromthe beginning. Mohsen remains on his argumental position against Saeed’s verbal attacks. But after a whilehe realizes his position is not defendable

Non-metaphoric paraphrase

Saeed and Mohsen always disagree with each other when arguing. They take disagree with each other fromthe beginning. Mohsen insists on his view against Saeed’s criticisms. But after a while he realizes he cannotargue for his views

Target sentence

He doesn’t have enough weapons and ammunition to continue the battle

corpus-based procedure followed to extract conventional usage patterns of metaphors isdepicted in Fig. 1.

To write the non-conventional expressions, all the conventional expressions used in con-ventional version, were rephrased and used in a novel (non-conventional) way. We checkedthe resulting expressions in the corpus and made certain that they are mainly used in thesource domain of the metaphor with a literal meaning. For the non-metaphorical paraphraseversion scenarios, we paraphrased the conventional version expressions in a way that theydidn’t have salient metaphorical reading. Table 2 shows the three different scenarios writtenfor ARGUMANT IS WAR metaphor.

The scenario sets of 7 out of 9 metaphors (excluding the target sentence) consisted offour sentences. The first sentence of the scenarios introduced the topic and each sentenceof the remaining three sentences basically embedded one conventional or non-conventionalmetaphoric expression except the paraphrase scenarios which served as the control condition(see Table 2). The remaining two metaphors, i.e. DIFFICULTIES ARE BURDENS andMORALITY IS CLEANNESS, had three sentences. The reason for these metaphors to havethree sentences was that only two keywords were identified for these metaphors that couldbe conventionally phrased as prime sentences of the scenarios. As we mentioned in thebeginning of the section, the keywords in the body of metaphorical scenarios were selectedbased on the CMT literature and we just made certain, by corpus searches, that Persianequivalent of these keywords, (1) are used metaphorically in Persian, and (2) they are not deadmetaphors.

The target sentence which had a literal meaning was identical in all of the three conditionsof a scenario set. The key lexical items in the target sentences were selected intuitively in amanner that they were semantically related to the keywords in the prime sentences and thetarget sentence formed a coherent discourse together with preceding prime sentences. Forexample, if keywords defendable, attack, position (Which belonged to the source domain ofWAR) were used in the body of scenarios, the target sentence keywords also belonged tothe same semantic field of WAR domain, like ammunition, weapons, battle. It was reasonedif reading a scenario (which has source domain-related keywords) activates source domainrepresentations, then this activated knowledge should be also available in understanding the

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target sentence. Given this assumption, we predicted that understanding the target sentencein the novel version condition should be faster than the other two conditions because non-conventional use of prime sentences in this condition is most likely to activate source domainrepresentations and facilitate comprehension of the literal target sentence.

In order to avoid possible associative priming between the last prime sentence and targetsentence, we employed a corpus-based method (Church and Hanks 1990) and searched thekeywords of the target sentence in the corpus for significant collocates. Top 10 significantcollocates (Min. frequency > 6) in a window span of ±3 words ranked according to theirMI measure were calculated by AntConc to make sure that the last prime sentence keywordswere not among them.

In addition to the experimental scenarios, nine filler scenarios were also constructed sothat subjects would not notice any pattern in the experimental items. The fillers describedvariety of topics with a non-metaphorical tone. The materials were counterbalanced usingLatin Square design. So the experimental scenarios were divided into three lists such that eachlist included one version of each scenario set and each list included three scenarios for eachcondition. The experimental scenarios were intermixed with filler scenarios in an alternateorder, but presented randomly to the subjects. In order to further cover the purpose of theexperiment and also make sure that participants paid attention when reading sentences, asimple question in the form of a statement was placed after each experimental/filler scenario.The subjects were supposed to decide whether the statement based on the scenario wascorrect or incorrect. Putting a question after each item would direct the attention of subjectsto questions as the main focus of the experiment.

The design of the experiment was within-subjects, with three conditions: conventionalmetaphor, non-conventional metaphor, and non-metaphor.

Procedure

Subjects were asked to sit behind a P4 PC with the screen size of 20 inches. The experimentstarted with an instruction page. They were told that the aim of the study was to study theirreading comprehension of short scenarios. Participants were instructed to press one of theSHIFT keys (left or right) as soon as they understood each sentence of the scenarios untilthey were asked to decide the correctness of a statement based on the scenario. They weretold that it was important to respond rapidly and accurately. After the instructions subjectsread two practice scenarios to get familiar with the procedure. The scenarios were presentedin random order. Before every scenario started, a line of 15 asterisks (as a substitute forfixation cross) was displayed for 1,000 ms. Subjects pressed one of the SHIFT keys to get thenext sentence. After reading the last sentence (the target), they received a question statement.They pressed Right SHIFT key if the statement was correct, Left SHIFT if the statementwas incorrect. After the response a visual feedback was provided. Then the “End of thestory” was displayed on the screen and subjects pressed the Space bar to proceed to the nextscenario. The experiment was built and run by DMDX 4.0.4.8 (Forster and Forster 2003).Reading times for all the prime and target sentences were collected by the program. Theentire experiment took about 15 min.

Results and Discussion

One subject did not follow instructions correctly during the experiment, so her data wereexcluded from the analysis. Here the data analysis for 54 subjects has been reported. The

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Fig. 2 Mean reading times for three conditions of the experiment

collected responses were first checked for the number of incorrect answers provided tothe final questions. No subject had crossed the admissible 30 % incorrect answers for 19questions. The reading times of filler scenarios were discarded and only the reading time forthe target sentences were preserved for the analysis.

The reading times were standardized using Z-score. Those scores which were above 4SD were replaced with the condition mean. This was resulted in modification of two readingtimes with 6,002 ms and 8,267 ms belonging to conventional and non-conventional condi-tions respectively. The data were analyzed in SPSS (ver. 18) using repeated measures one-wayANOVA. There was a significant main effect of condition type, [F(2, 106) = 13.13, p <

0.001].5 Multiple comparisons also showed that mean reading time in any condition sig-nificantly differed from any other condition mean (α = 0.05). The mean reading time andstandard deviation (in parenthesis) was 1,952 (430) ms for non-conventional, 2,095 (522) msfor conventional and 2,282 (487) ms for non-metaphor condition. Figure 2 shows the patternof mean reading times in the three conditions.

The results of the experiment confirm the research hypothesis that conventional metaphoricexpressions activate source domain representations but not as strongly as non-conventionalexpressions and reading target sentence following conventional scenarios is not as slow asnon-metaphoric paraphrase scenarios.

Our findings are in partial agreement with the results obtained by Keysar et al. (2000). Ina series of reading time experiments, they investigated whether people routinely use con-ceptual mapping to understand conventional metaphoric expressions. In the first exper-iment, they compared reading time of a novel-metaphor target sentence in the contextof scenarios with no metaphorical mapping, implicit-mapping, explicit-mapping, and lit-eral meaning. Reading the target sentence after the literal scenarios was faster than the

5 F2 has not been reported because the items were not randomly sampled from a population that we wouldlike to generalize to (Raaijmakers et al. 1999).

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other conditions. The mean reading time in the implicit-mapping condition (which instan-tiated conventional metaphors) was not significantly faster than in the no-mapping condi-tion. In the second experiment, the explicit-mapping condition was replaced with a novelmetaphor condition. The mean reading time in novel as well as literal conditions was sig-nificantly faster than the non-metaphor and implicit-mapping conditions. Taken together,these results were interpreted as supporting the main hypothesis of the study that under-standing conventional metaphorical expressions (even when explicitly articulated in the sce-narios) do not instantiate conceptual mappings. The present study, based on a systematiccorpus-based extraction of conventional metaphoric expressions, agrees with that part ofKeysar et al.’s findings that conventional metaphors are weaker than novel ones to activatesource-domain representations, but disagrees that conventional metaphors are as dead asnon-metaphors.

In a recent study by Thibodeau and Durgin (2008) it’s been argued that absence offacilitation after reading conventional metaphor scenarios in Keysar et al.’s study has beencaused by some confounding factor such as lack of match between conventional conditionprime sentences and the target sentence. They replicated Keysar et al.’s experiment andtoo failed to find any facilitating effect in the conventional condition. However, they rea-soned that specific metaphoric phrases in the conventional condition did not lead or “fit”into the target sentences as well as the novel metaphoric expressions did. Participants wereasked to judge the non-conventionality and fit of the stimulus materials used by Keysar etal. (2000). Among three conditions (novel, conventional, and non-metaphoric), the novelmetaphor scenarios were not only judged as more unconventional, they were also judgedto fit much better with target sentences. They developed new stimuli that used conven-tional or novel metaphors that were conceptually consistent. After making improvementsto Keysar et al.’s materials, Thibodeau and Durgin found that reading target sentence inscenarios with conventional metaphorical expressions was as faster as the novel metaphoricscenarios.

Although Thibodeau and Durgin (2008) find the opposite of Keysar et al. (2000) findingssuggesting that conventional metaphors are as alive as novel metaphors, our findings stillremain in contrast with those of Thibodeau and Durgin in another respect. In extracting con-ventional metaphoric expressions, Thibodeau and Durgin show some concern about the trueconventionality of metaphorical expressions. To ensure that their constructed conventionalmetaphors were truly conventional, they used Google search engine to check the frequencyof particular phrases. For example they found 784 search results for the expression “argu-ment was shaky” and its variants including “argument is shaky” or “shaky argument”, butonly 131 hits when “shaky” was replaced with “wobbly”. So it seems they have concludedthat the expression with higher search results would be more conventional. Although usingfrequency information obtained from websites like Google can be a good starting point toform hypotheses about a linguistic phenomenon, it may cause serious problems if not fol-lowed by a more systematic and refined method like a corpus study. For example, one suchproblem with Google frequencies is the duplicate pages which could inflate frequency countsdrastically (Lüdeling et al. 2007). This problem doesn’t arise in a carefully compiled cor-pus. Thus the fact that Thibodeau and Durgin don’t find any significant difference betweenmean reading times of conventional vs. novel metaphors conditions, might not be uniquelyattributed to the capability of conventional metaphoric expressions in activating mental con-ceptual metaphors. The cause could have been that the conventional metaphoric expressionsmay not have been truly conventional based on the abovementioned problem of web-basedfrequencies.

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Our experimental results are consistent with Svanlund (2007) corpus findings that con-ventional metaphoric expressions occupy a middle ground in the novel-dead metaphor con-tinuum. They are not as strong as novel (non-conventional) metaphors, but they are cer-tainly not dead. However, it is reasonable to assume that if conventional metaphors con-tinue to be used in target domain meaning without any source domain usage finally theywill become dead metaphors. This process, as predicted by Career of Metaphor hypoth-esis (Bowdle and Gentner 2005), leads novel metaphors through several stages to deadones.

One important implication of this study is that semantic content of metaphoric expres-sions (or lexical metaphors) may not be completely determined by their underlying concep-tual metaphor. This is important because the relationship between conceptual metaphors andlinguistic metaphors seems to be assumed a direct and simple one in CMT. In the CMT,linguistic metaphors are claimed to be simply reflections of conceptual metaphors, so theirmeaning is dependent on the motivating conceptual metaphor. We agree this may be the casewhen a linguistic metaphor is formed for the first time and the instantiation of the conceptualmetaphor in the form of linguistic metaphor is novel. However, as explained by Career ofMetaphor hypothesis, through the process of conventionalization this connection might beweakened or even lost at extreme cases. Here a question may rise that how conventional-ization may lead to loss of connection between linguistic expressions and their conceptualcounterparts? The present study doesn’t provide an answer to this question, but a possibleanswer can be found in the semantic change literature which is known as the process ofpragmatic strengthening (Traugott 1989). The process of pragmatic strengthening justifiesplausibility of the results obtained in the present study and similar findings suggesting lackof activation or weak activation for conventional metaphoric expressions (e.g. Glucksberg etal. 1993; Keysar et al. 2000; Kemmerer 2005). According to this process, when a linguisticexpression is used in a certain context regularly and frequently, the entailments and impli-catures produced in the context become part of the meaning of that expression. Metaphoricexpressions also seem to be governed by this process in a manner that ultimately leads totheir death.

For example, Evans and Tyler (2004) show how the process of pragmatic strengtheningcan account for the creation of the distinct state sense from spatial sense of the prepositionin. They present the following example:

a. She is in the prison.b. She is a prisoner.c. She is in prison.

They argue that sentence (a) has a spatial meaning. In this sentence the purpose of the boundedlandmark (prison) is to restrict the freedom of the one inside it. Hence, it’s argued, that thestate of being prisoner [sentence (b)] is correlated in experience with being located in abounded place or a prison. So the context, they argue, via the process of inference and worldknowledge causes a particular state to be associated with a bounded location. Evans and Tyler(2004; 8) continue:

If an experientially-motivated inference is recurring, it can be reanalyzed as distinctfrom the scene of which it is a part. Through continued use, this process may lead tothe strengthening or conventionalization of the inference, resulting in its developmentas a distinct meaning component associated with the lexical form with which it isrelated, i.e. in. As a consequence, in has, in addition to its ’containment’ meaningin [a], a conventional State Sense associated with it, as illustrated by [c]. Indeed, this

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sentence could be applied to a prisoner outside the prison on day release, while [a] couldnot”

Along the same lines Tyler and Evans (2003) argue that when speakers use the state senseof in as in I am in trouble or I am in love, ”they do not actually conceive themselves asbeing physically contained or surrounded by the emotion… these senses themselves areconventionalized and no longer involve the speaker actively drawing on metaphorical con-ceptualizations when conventionalized sense is used” (p. 61). We would like to emphasizethe importance of specifying the point we attribute to the conventionality of metaphor alongthe novel-dead continuum. For example, Tyler and Evans’s (2003) conception of “conven-tionality” is clearly near the end point (dead metaphors) of the continuum. However, ourfindings put the conventionality in the middle of the novel-dead metaphor continuum whichmeans the expressions we used are not conventionalized to the extent that they are consid-ered dead metaphors. Whether we consider “conventional” as dead or semi-alive, pragmaticstrengthening is a possible motivation for the process of conventionalization of metaphorswhich awaits further research.

This is the first study, to our knowledge, that integrates corpus-based and psycholinguisticmethods to study conventional metaphorical patterns in the corpus and construct experimentalmaterials accordingly. Also this is the first study in Persian to explore the role of languageuse on the processing of metaphoric expressions. However, there are limitations with thisstudy which can be improved in the future research. First, the corpus used as the source ofour experimental materials consists of journalistic texts with formal style, so the findingscannot be generalized to the informal spoken language. Second, the participants were allgraduate (MA and Ph.D.) university students which means they had higher reading skillsthan the average people of the society. Therefore the results are not generalizable to themajority of Persian speakers. The last limitation of the study was that we didn’t assessthe degree of fit between the scenarios and the target sentences as Thibodeau and Durgin(2008) did. So it might be argued that higher mean reading times we got for the targetsentences conventional and non-metaphor conditions could have been caused by lack offit than weakness in activation of conceptual metaphors. In response, we reasoned if lackof fit would have been responsible for the higher mean reading times in conventional andnon-metaphor conditions, then there should have been no significant difference between thetwo conditions because conventional-metaphor scenarios are very similar to non-metaphorscenarios in terms of metaphorical markedness. However, we don’t completely rule out thepossible lack-of-fit explanation and leave it for future studies to handle this limitation in amore systematic way.

We would also like to point to the implications of the present study to the theory ofmetaphor. Our findings stress the role that repetition plays in the representation of metaphor-ical meanings. Meaning of conventional metaphoric expressions seems not to be completelypredictable from their underlying conceptual mappings. Especially the claim “[t]he fact thatthey are conventionally fixed within the lexicon… makes them no less alive” (Lakoff andJohnson 1980, 55) is not supported by our results because the psycholinguistic experimentshowed that conventionally fixed metaphoric expressions are “less alive” than their novelwordings. Along the same lines, the assumption held by CMT that conventional metaphoricexpressions “are reflections of systematic metaphorical concepts that structure our actionsand thoughts” (ibid.) is challenged by our findings. The reason is that we interpret somethingbeing a “reflection” of a something else as excellent (if not full) correspondence betweenthe two and this will too include semantic content in the case of metaphoric expressions.However, the results obtained in the present study showed that semantic content of the

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conventional metaphoric expressions is not a reflection of their conceptual counterpart.This suggests that the relationship between the conceptual metaphors (as a part of con-ceptual system) and linguistic metaphors (as governed by conceptual as well as linguisticsystems and language use factors) is not a simple one-to-one relationship flowing fromconceptual metaphors to linguistic metaphors, but semantic content of linguistic metaphorsthrough the process of conventionalization can be modified independently from their con-ceptual counterparts which first motivated their meaning. As suggested by Deignan (2005,193), there are two opposing forces that shape linguistic form of metaphors. One force isthe need to form and express abstract concepts through metaphors (explained by CMT)and the other force is to reuse known sequences of words with established meanings tocommunicate effectively and unambiguously. We acknowledge that more work need tobe done about the latter and the future research on the processing of metaphoric expres-sions can shed more light on the delicate interactions between conceptual and linguisticsystem.

Conclusion

The present study attempted to improve over previous research on metaphor processing in animportant way and it was the use of language corpus in extracting conventional metaphoricexpressions to be used in the psycholinguistic experiment. In this research we explored theon-line processing of conventional metaphoric expressions in Persian. We used a languagecorpus to extract conventional metaphoric expressions and used them to construct experi-mental scenarios for a reading-time experiment. The results of the experiment showed thatconventional metaphoric expressions, due to the process of conventionalization, are weakerin activating source domain representations than non-conventional metaphoric expressions.Finally we discussed the implications of this study for the theory of metaphor, especiallyconceptual metaphor theory. We argued that the semantic relationship between conven-tional metaphoric expressions and their conceptual counterparts motivating them is not aone-to-one relationship making semantics of linguistic metaphors dependant on concep-tual metaphors, but through the process of conventionalization, semantics of metaphoricexpressions can be distanced from their conceptual counterparts which first motivated theirmeaning.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments thathelped us to improve the manuscript. We thank Sid Horton (Northwestern University) for providing us withthe experimental materials of Keysar et al. (2000) and discussing the results. We also thank Diane Pecher(Erasmus University Rotterdam) for her valuable comments on the materials and design of the reading timeexperiment.

Appendix 1

See Table 3.

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Table 3 Original experimental items in Persian

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Table 3 continued

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Appendix 2

See Table 4.

Table 4 Experimental items translated from Persian

Conventional Non-conventional Non-metaphorical paraphrase

ARGUMENT IS WAR

Saeed and Mohsen always dis-agree with each other when argu-ing. They take position againsteach other from the beginning.Mohsen remains on his argumen-tal position against Saeed’s verbalattacks. But after a while he real-izes his position is not defendable

Saeed and Mohsen always dis-agree with each other when argu-ing. They build trenches againsteach other from the beginning.Mohsen remains on his argumen-tal trench against Saeed’s verbalmissile attack. But after a whilehe realizes he cannot defend histrench against bombardment

Saeed and Mohsen always dis-agree with each other when argu-ing. They take disagree with eachother from the beginning. Mohseninsists on his view against Saeed’scriticisms. But after a while herealizes he cannot argue for hisviews

Target sentence:

He doesn’t have enoughweapons and ammunition tocontinue the battle



DIFFICULTIES ARE BURDENS

Ali has difficult responsibilitiesafter the death of his wife. Theheavy responsibility of bringingup of children is on his shoulders.He has never tried to stop shoul-dering this responsibility

Ali has difficult responsibilitiesafter the death of his wife. Thehundreds-kilogram responsibilityof bringing up of children restson his shoulders. He has neverwanted to put down this rock ofresponsibility

Ali has difficult responsibilitiesafter the death of his wife. Hehas the heavy responsibility ofbringing up children. He has neverwanted to evade this responsibility

Target sentence:

He can carry heavier weightsthan this



LIFE IS A JOURNEY

Reza has had a successful andhealthy life. He has never deviatedin the life. Reza has experiencedmany up and downs in life. He hasbeen at forks frequently in his lifedecisions

Reza has had a successful andhealthy life. He has never got offthe track in the life. Reza has gonethrough many uphills and down-hills in life. He has been at cross-roads frequently in his life deci-sions

Reza has had a successful andhealthy life. He has never devi-ated from his goal in the life. Rezahas experienced many difficultiesin life. He has been at dilemmasfrequently in his life decisions

Target sentence:

But the road side signs haveshown him the main path



IDEAS ARE PLANTS

Science is one of the importantachievements in the humans’ his-tory. Scientists have for centuriesobserved the grown and flourishof science. It’s been for years thatvarious scientific branches havebeen fruitful. Fruits of sciencescan be increased in several ways:

Science is one of the importantachievements in the humans’ his-tory. Scientists have for centuriesobserved the growing and blos-soming of science. It’s been foryears that various branches of sci-ence tree have produced manyfruits. Fruits of sciences can beincreased in several ways:

Science is one of the importantachievements in the humans’ his-tory. Scientists have for centuriesobserved the development of sci-ence. It’s been for years that vari-ous scientific fields have benefitedhumans. Scientific achievementscan be increased in several ways:

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Table 4 continued


Target sentence:

One of these is to use fertilizersand pesticides



IDEAS ARE BUILDING

Nasser’s hypothesis on mindhas become controversial. Mostof the professors find Nasser’shypothesis baseless. Nasser hasaccepted that his hypothesis hasbeen designed on the basis ofweak arguments. If he doesn’tstrengthen his theoretical bases:

Nasser’s hypothesis on mind hasbecome controversial. Most of theprofessors find Nasser’s hypothe-sis without foundation. Nasser hasaccepted that the scaffolding ofhis hypothesis has been built onstrengthless pillars. If he doesn’tfortify the foundation of his theo-retical bases:

Nasser’s hypothesis on mind hasbecome controversial. Most of theprofessors find Nasser’s hypothe-sis incorrect. Nasser has acceptedthat the premises of his hypoth-esis are inaccurate. If he doesn’timprove his theoretical principles:

Target sentence:

The ceiling and the walls maycollapse altogether



TO BE IN A (MENTAL) STATEIS TO BE IN A SEA/WATER

Saeed is a student of philosophy.He is drowned in thinking andstudying day and night. But hisclassmates are engaged in super-ficial discussions. Saeed’s goal isto deepen his research on philo-sophical theories

Saeed is a student of philosophy.He has drowned himself in theocean of thinking and studyingday and night. But his classmatesare floating on the surface of thisocean. Saeed’s goal is to skin-divein the bottom of philosophy sea

Saeed is a student of philoso-phy. He is studying and thinkingday and night. But his classmatesare engaged in simple discussions.Saeed’s goal is to broaden hisresearch on philosophical theories

Target sentence:

He can go down by severalmeters with a single dive



MENTAL DAMAGE IS PHYSI-CAL DAMAGE

Ali has always tried to overcomethe effects of annoying words.Some of his friends wound him bytongue. Hearing sarcastic wordshas always been a painful experi-ence for Ali. He knows that dam-ages of these words should be less-ened

Ali has always tried to overcomethe effects of annoying words.Some of his friends injure him bythe dagger of their words. Hit bysarcastic words, Ali has experi-enced severe pains. He knows thatlacerations caused by these dag-gers should be lessened

Ali has always tried to overcomethe effects of annoying words.Some of his friends disturb himby their words. Hearing sarcas-tic words has always been annoy-ing for Ali. He knows that disad-vantages of these words should belessened

Target sentence:

Because it is possible the woundsbecome infected



ARGUMENT IS JOURNEY

Psychologists explain the prin-ciples of successful discussionsamong couples as follows: Cou-ples follow the course of discus-sion without pause. It is impor-tant they give a new direction totheir discussion. Until they finallyarrive to an agreed upon conclu-sion. Couples should remember:

Psychologists explain the prin-ciples of successful discussionsamong couples as follows: Cou-ples drive the road of discussionnon-stop. It is important they trynew roads in the way of their dis-cussion. Until they finally park byan agreed upon conclusion. Cou-ples should remember:

Psychologists explain the prin-ciples of successful discussionsamong couples as follows: Cou-ples continuously have their dis-cussion. It is important they dis-cuss new topics. Until they finallyagree on a conclusion. Couplesshould remember:

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Table 4 continued


Target sentence:

Their journey shouldn’t takelonger



MORALITY IS CLEANNESS

Arash is a religious and abstinentperson. He believes that believersin God should have a clean heart.Arash’s father has said to him thatif one’s heart becomes sin-stained

Arash is a religious and abstinentperson. He believes that believersin God should have a cleaned andwhite heart. Arash’s father has saidto him that if one’s heart shirt beblack stained with sin

Arash is a religious and abstinentperson. He believes that believersin God should have a shiny heart.Arash’s father has said to him thatif one’s heart is used to sins

Target sentence:

It cannot be washed away evenwith a strong detergent



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