The Secret of Metaphor on Expressing Stronger Emotion

TL;DR

This paper investigates why metaphors express stronger emotions than literal language, finding that metaphors are more specific, which enhances emotional impact, and that increasing specificity in literal language can also boost emotional expression.

Contribution

This is the first study to analyze how metaphors convey stronger emotions, highlighting the role of specificity in emotional expression in both metaphors and literal language.

Findings

Metaphors are generally more specific than literal expressions.

Reducing the specificity gap diminishes the emotional difference.

Specificity enhances emotional expression in literal language.

Abstract

Metaphors are proven to have stronger emotional impact than literal expressions. Although this conclusion is shown to be promising in benefiting various NLP applications, the reasons behind this phenomenon are not well studied. This paper conducts the first study in exploring how metaphors convey stronger emotion than their literal counterparts. We find that metaphors are generally more specific than literal expressions. The more specific property of metaphor can be one of the reasons for metaphors' superiority in emotion expression. When we compare metaphors with literal expressions with the same specificity level, the gap of emotion expressing ability between both reduces significantly. In addition, we observe specificity is crucial in literal language as well, as literal language can express stronger emotion by making it more specific.