How can metaphors be interpreted cross-linguistically?

Abstract

Research on metaphor as a phenomenon amenable to the techniques of computational linguistics received a substantial boost from a recent US government (the iARPA agency) funding initiative that set up a number of teams in major universities to address the issues of metaphor detection and interpretation on a large scale in text. Part of the stated goal of the project was to detect linguistic metaphors (LMs) computationally in texts in four languages and map them all to a single set of conceptual metaphors (CMs). Much of the inspiration for this funding was the classic work (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) which posited a set of universal metaphors used across cultures and languages.