Concreteness and Interaction in Open-Ended Metaphor Interpretation

Abstract

Metaphor research has historically treated the factor of concreteness as an assumption rather than a facet to critically explore. Psycholinguistics research in parallel has found that concrete words are processed more quickly and with clearer imageability than abstract words. Adopting an Interactionist approach, we explore in this thesis how concepts shape one another through their metaphorization, arguing that concreteness is an important, often-overlooked dimension of this interaction. The present thesis interrogates many core ideas in metaphor literature, including the nature of abstraction as both a process and a product, the role of relationality, the fixedness of categories, sources of metaphor inference, and the role of propositional and sensorimotor knowledge. We also present three studies, the first of which is mainly qualitative, investigating whether Topic concreteness has a bearing on Vehicle-derived interpretative diversity. The second study explores interpretive diversity as well, but with a more quantitative approach, as well as comparing the effects of concreteness on the portion of shared and emergent features in metaphor interpretations. Our third study examines relational construal in metaphor inference according to two variables, lexical concept concreteness and Topic article. While overall, we find little evidence of a direct concreteness effect on interpretive diversity in both Study 1 and 2, we find effects on the appearance of emergent and shared features. We also find that concreteness has a close relation to situational specificity through the relational construals people make through simulating the context in which a metaphor is situated. The Topic’s preceding article has a substantial effect on relational construal in metaphor, where the evokes significantly more argument inclusions in verbs phrases, suggesting that grammatical Grounding plays a crucial role in metaphor interpretation and how concretely people construe a metaphor. This goes beyond comparing concepts in the abstract and emphasises the need for considering grammatically-signalled pragmatic sources of inference in metaphor. Ultimately, we argue that concreteness is a fluid dimension of concepts in both a lexical and contextual sense, which metaphor exploits to great creativity in its interpretation.

Date of Award	15 Jan 2026
Original language	English
Supervisor	Alan Wallington (Supervisor) & Thora Tenbrink (Supervisor)