Abstract
This paper investigates the ways English speakers employ the predicates like, similar, and resemble to express similarity in natural speech. A corpus of 450 instances was created and manually coded, and an acceptability rating experiment was conducted. Converging evidence from the corpus analysis and the experiment shows that the three predicates occur with the same range of uses, but differ in their propensities to occur with particular dimensions of similarity. Specifically, like is associated with metaphorical comparisons, and resemble is associated with visual comparisons. A synchronic account of these findings is developed, based on a distinction between conventionally encoded meaning and prototypical usage. A diachronic account is also proposed, highlighting the commonality in the predicates’ conceptual origins and the differences in their historical usage. This work has theoretical and methodological implications for the study of similarity. In particular, it raises the possibility that previous findings may be distorted due to a reliance on certain similarity predicates in the phrasing of experimental instructions and stimuli. It also ties into debates on synonymy, suggesting a shift in attention from a distinction between denotational and associative meaning, to the aforementioned distinction between conventional and prototypical meaning.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Mira Ariel, Yeshayahu Shen, Malka Rappaport Hovav, and participants at IGDAL 5 for insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful for the constructive criticism and valuable suggestions by Dagmar Divjak, Dasha Hanzlikova and three anonymous reviewers. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 431/15 to Mira Ariel, and grant no. 1196/12 to Yeshayahu Shen).
References
Alrenga, Peter. 2007. Dimensions in the semantics of comparatives. PhD thesis. University of California Santa Cruz.Search in Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 2008. Pragmatics and grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511791314Search in Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 2016. Revisiting the typology of pragmatic interpretations. Intercultural Pragmatics 13(1). 1–35.10.1515/ip-2016-0001Search in Google Scholar
Bowdle, Brian F. & Douglas L. Medin. 2001. Reference-point reasoning and comparison asymmetries. In Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 116–121. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2003. Cognitive processes in grammaticalization. In Michael Tomasello (ed.), The new psychology of language (Vol. 2), 145–167. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and utterances: The pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell.10.1002/9780470754603Search in Google Scholar
Chiappe, Dan L. & John M. Kennedy. 2001. Literal bases for metaphor and simile. Metaphor and Symbol 16(3–4). 249–276.10.1080/10926488.2001.9678897Search in Google Scholar
Christensen, Rune H. B. 2018. ordinal – Regression models for ordinal data. R package version 2018. 8–25. http://www.cran.r-project.org/package=ordinal/.Search in Google Scholar
Citron, Francesca M. M. & Adele E. Goldberg. 2014. Metaphorical sentences are more emotionally engaging than their literal counterparts. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 26(11). 2585–2595.10.1162/jocn_a_00654Search in Google Scholar
Cruse, D. Alan. 2000. Aspects of the micro-structure of word meanings. In Yael Ravin & Claudia Leacock (eds.), Polysemy: Theoretical and computational approaches, 30–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2010. The corpus of historical American English (COHA): 400 million words, 1810-2009. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.Search in Google Scholar
Divjak, Dagmar. 2006. Ways of intending: A corpus-based cognitive linguistic approach to near-synonyms in Russian. In Stefan Th. Gries & Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in cognitive linguistics: Corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis, 19–56. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110197709.19Search in Google Scholar
Divjak, Dagmar & Stefan Th. Gries. 2006. Ways of trying in Russian: Clustering behavioral profiles. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2. 23–60.10.1515/CLLT.2006.002Search in Google Scholar
Fishman, Alon & Yeshayahu Shen. In preparation. The (bi-directional) relation between grammatical asymmetry and metaphoricity.Search in Google Scholar
Fortescue, Michael. 2010. Similitude: A conceptual category. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 42(2). 117–142.10.1080/03740463.2010.521442Search in Google Scholar
Giora, Rachel, Ofer Fein, Nili Metuki & Pnina Stern. 2010. Negation as a metaphor-inducing operator. In Wolfgang Klein & Stephen Levinson (eds.), The expression of cognitive categories, Vol. 4: The expression of negation, 225–256. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110219302.225Search in Google Scholar
Gleitman, Lila R., Henry Gleitman, Carol Miller & Ruth Ostrin. 1996. Similar, and similar concepts. Cognition 58(3). 321–376.10.1093/oso/9780199828098.003.0021Search in Google Scholar
Glucksberg, Sam & Catrinel Haught. 2006. On the relation between metaphor and simile: When comparison fails. Mind and Language 21(3). 360–378.10.1111/j.1468-0017.2006.00282.xSearch in Google Scholar
Glucksberg, Sam & Boaz Keysar. 1990. Understanding metaphorical comparisons: Beyond similarity. Psychological Review 97(1). 3–18.10.1037/0033-295X.97.1.3Search in Google Scholar
Glynn, Dylan. 2014. Polysemy and synonymy. Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative Studies in Polysemy and Synonymy 43. 7–38.10.1075/hcp.43.01glySearch in Google Scholar
Goodman, Nelson. 1972. Seven strictures on similarity. In Nelson Goodman (ed.), Problems and projects, 437–447. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.Search in Google Scholar
Harmon, Zara & Vsevolod Kapatsinski. 2017. Putting old tools to novel uses: The role of form accessibility in semantic extension. Cognitive Psychology 98. 22–44.10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.08.002Search in Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 2003. The geometry of grammatical meaning: Semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison. The New Psychology of Language 2(1976). 1–30.Search in Google Scholar
Java, Akshay, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin & Belle Tseng. 2007. Why we twitter: Understanding microblogging usage and communities. In Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis, 56–65. New York: ACM.10.1145/1348549.1348556Search in Google Scholar
Kilgariff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý & Vít Suchomel. 2014. The sketch engine: Ten years on. Lexicography 1. 7–36.10.1007/s40607-014-0009-9Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, Jane Espenson & Alan Schwartz. 1991. Master metaphor list. Second draft copy. Technical report, Cognitive Linguistics Group, University of California Berkeley.Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.Search in Google Scholar
McSparran, Frances (Chief editor). 2018. Middle English Compendium. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Available online at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/.Search in Google Scholar
Medin, Douglas L., Robert L. Goldstone & Dedre Gentner. 1993. Respects for similarity. Psychological Review 100(2). 254–278.10.1037/0033-295X.100.2.254Search in Google Scholar
Murphy, Gregory L. & Douglas L. Medin. 1985. The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92. 289–316.10.1037/0033-295X.92.3.289Search in Google Scholar
Murphy, M. Lynne. 2003. Semantic relations and the lexicon: Antonymy, synonymy, and other paradigms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486494Search in Google Scholar
Ortony, Andrew. 1979. Beyond literal similarity. Psychological Review 86(3). 161–180.10.1037/0033-295X.86.3.161Search in Google Scholar
Ortony, Andrew, Richard J. Vondruska, Mark A. Foss & Lawrence E. Jones. 1985. Salience, similes, and the asymmetry of similarity. Journal of Memory and Language 24(5). 569–594.10.1016/0749-596X(85)90047-6Search in Google Scholar
Payne, Stanley L. 1951. The art of asking questions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Porat, Roy & Yeshayahu Shen. 2015. Imposed metaphoricity. Metaphor and Symbol 30(2). 77–94.10.1080/10926488.2015.1016796Search in Google Scholar
Porat, Roy & Yeshayahu Shen. 2017. Metaphor: The journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality. Poetics Today 38(1). 123–140.10.1215/03335372-3716252Search in Google Scholar
Pothos, Emmanuel M., Jerome R. Busemeyer & Jennifer S. Trueblood. 2013. A quantum geometric model of similarity. Psychological Review 120(3). 679–696.10.1037/a0033142Search in Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. 2011. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Search in Google Scholar
San Roque, Lila, Kobin H., Kendrick, Elisabeth Norcliffe, Penelope Brown, Rebecca Defina, Mark Dingemanse, Tyko Dirksmeyer, NJ Enfield, Simeon Floyd, Jeremy Hammond, Giovanni Rossi, Sylvia Tufvesson, Saskia van Putten & Asifa Majid. 2015. Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies. Cognitive Linguistics 26. 31–60.10.1515/cog-2014-0089Search in Google Scholar
Schulze, Wolfgang. 2017. Towards a cognitive typology of ‘like’-expressions. In Yvonne Treis & Martine Vanhove (eds.), Similative and equative constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective, 33–77. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.117.03schSearch in Google Scholar
Shen, Yeshayahu. 1989. Symmetric and asymmetric comparisons. Poetics 18. 517–536.10.1016/0304-422X(89)90010-7Search in Google Scholar
Shepard, Roger N. 1962a. The analysis of proximities: Multidimensional scaling with an unknown distance function: Part I. Psychometrika 27(2). 125–140.10.1007/BF02289630Search in Google Scholar
Shepard, Roger N. 1962b. The analysis of proximities: Multidimensional scaling with an unknown distance function: Part II. Psychometrika 27(3). 219–246.10.1007/BF02289630Search in Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Steen, Gerard J., Aletta G. Dorst, J. Berenike Herrmann, Anna Kaal, Tina Krennmayr & Trijntje Pasma. 2010. A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/celcr.14Search in Google Scholar
Sullivan, Karen. 2007. Metaphoric extension and invited inferencing in semantic change. Cultura, lenguaje y representación 5. 255–271.Search in Google Scholar
Talmy, Leonard. 1978. Figure and ground in complex sentences. In Joseph H. Greenberg, Charles A. Ferguson & Edith A. Moravcsik (eds.), Universals of human language (IV), Stanford: Stanford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486500Search in Google Scholar
Tversky, Amos. 1977. Features of similarity. Psychological Review 84(4). 327–352.10.1016/B978-1-4832-1446-7.50025-XSearch in Google Scholar
Winter, Bodo & Teenie Matlock. 2013. Making judgments based on similarity and proximity. Metaphor and Symbol 28(4). 219–232.10.1080/10926488.2013.826529Search in Google Scholar
Wolff, Phillip & Dedre Gentner. 2011. Structure-mapping in metaphor comprehension. Cognitive Science 35(8). 1456–1488.10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01194.xSearch in Google Scholar
Xiao, Richard & Tony McEnery. 2006. Collocation, semantic prosody, and near synonymy: A cross-linguistic perspective. Applied Linguistics 27(1). 103–129.10.1093/applin/ami045Search in Google Scholar
Zipf, George Kingsley. 1949. Human behaviour and the principle of least-effort. Cambridge: Addison-Wesley.Search in Google Scholar
Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2018-0086).
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
