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<Paper uid="W03-1402">
  <Title>Encoding information on metaphoric expressions in WordNet-like resources*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="3" end_page="3" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Metaphor
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Lakoff (1993) show that metaphor is not just a poetical way of speaking, rather it is deeply embedded in our language, culture and the way we think. Metaphor affects how we experience and interact with the world and other people: &amp;quot;the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person's conceptual system.&amp;quot; (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 6).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Thus, metaphor is a cognitive rather than a linguistic phenomenon, and word senses are related in terms of their underlying conceptual domains.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Metaphoric linguistic expressions are manifestations of 'conceptual metaphors', i.e. metaphorical structures which are present in our minds and relate a concrete source domain with a more abstract target domain. In other words, metaphoric expressions are the superficial realization of the mapping we perform from a 'literal' source semantic domain to a 'figurative' target semantic domain. At least two consequences follow from this perspective which should be considered when building a lexicon for NLP applications: i) metaphorical extension of word senses is a kind of regular polysemy (cf. Apresjan, 1973): e.g., He arrived ('came here' or 'was born') when we were 20; He left us ('went away' or 'died') after some time; ii) generalizations govern inference models, i.e.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> those cases in which an inference model from a certain conceptual domain is used in another do- null IWN was developed within the SI-TAL (Integrated System for the Automatic Treatment of Language) Italian project, devoted to the creation of large linguistic resources and software tools for the Italian written and spoken language processing. The database was built by extending the Italian wordnet realized within EWN, and inherited from EWN its main characteristics (general structure, relations, etc.; see Alonge et al. (2000) and Roventini et al. (forthcoming) for a detailed description of the IWN database).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> main: e.g., In our relationship we have faced many obstacles It has been difficult to go ahead.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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