Floating or Suggesting Ideas? A Large-Scale Contrastive Analysis of Metaphorical and Literal Verb-Object Constructions

TL;DR

This study conducts a large-scale contrastive analysis of metaphorical and literal verb-object pairs in English, revealing construction-specific differences and heterogeneity in their linguistic and cognitive features.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, feature-rich comparison of metaphorical and literal VO usage at scale, highlighting the diversity and complexity of their distributional patterns.

Findings

Literal contexts have higher lexical frequency and cohesion.

Metaphorical contexts show greater affective load and imageability.

Most VO pairs exhibit non-uniform effects, indicating heterogeneity.

Abstract

Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain limited, especially for near-synonymous expressions. We analyze 297 English verb-object pairs (e.g., float idea vs. suggest idea) in ~2M corpus sentences, examining their contextual usage. Using five NLP tools, we extract 2,293 cognitive and linguistic features capturing affective, lexical, syntactic, and discourse-level properties. We address: (i) whether features differ between metaphorical and literal contexts (cross-pair analysis), and (ii) whether individual VO pairs diverge internally (within-pair analysis). Cross-pair results show literal contexts have higher lexical frequency, cohesion, and structural regularity, while metaphorical contexts show greater affective load, imageability, lexical diversity, and constructional specificity. Within-pair analyses reveal substantial heterogeneity, with most pairs showing non-uniform effects. These results suggest no single, consistent distributional pattern that distinguishes metaphorical from literal usage. Instead, differences are largely construction-specific. Overall, large-scale data combined with diverse features provides a fine-grained understanding of metaphor-literal contrasts in VO usage.