Interpretive Diversity Explains Metaphor–Simile Distinction

Abstract

A number of properties—aptness, topic-vehicle similarity, vehicle conventionality—have recently been used to explain a metaphorsi-mile distinction. This paper argues that interpretive diversity better explains a metaphor-simile distinction than these properties. Interpretive diversity refers to the semantic richness of the figurative interpretation of a topic-vehicle pair and is determined depending on both the number of features involved in the interpretation and the uniformity of salience distribution of those features. The interpretive diversity view predicts that interpretively more diverse pairs should be easier to comprehend via a categorization process, and thus the preference for and the relative comprehensibility of the metaphor form should be greater. Two experiments demonstrated that, as predicted, interpretive diversity was correlated positively with metaphor preference (Experiment 1) and with the relative comprehensibility of the metaphor form compared to the simile form (Experiment 2). Furthermore, interpretive diversity was found to be more important in explaining metaphor-simile distinction than aptness, similarity, and conventionality.

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