Metaphors in context and in isolation: Familiarity, aptness, concreteness, metaphoricity, and structure norms for 300 two-word expressions

Abstract

Familiarity, aptness, concreteness, metaphoricity, and structural norms for 300 two-word English metaphorical expres sions (e.g., broken heart, early bird), presented in sentence context and in isolation, were obtained from 164 participants. Familiarity was conceived as the extent to which participants had previously heard or read that expression. Aptness was conceived as the extent to which the vehicle captured important features of the topic. Concreteness was conceived as the extent to which the meaning conveyed by the vehicle could be perceived through the senses or actions. Metaphoricity was conceived as the extent to which the expression was perceived as figuratively rather than literally true. Metaphor constituent structure was conceived as a graded measure indicating whether the metaphorical content is carried by the first word, the second word, or distributed across both words. In addition to these variables, which are known to play a key role in metaphor comprehension, we provide frequency scores for the whole expression as well as for each constituent separately from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) database. Cumulative link mixed-effects models were used to examine the effects of context and vehicle position on participants’ ratings, and to assess whether familiarity, aptness, and concrete ness predicted perceived metaphoricity. This set of norms, the first of its kind, serves as a resource for research employing a variety of computational, behavioral, and neuroimaging methods to examine the nature of metaphor comprehension and semantic composition.