Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The conventionalization of figurative comparisons is one source of lexical evolution. For example, anchor onceonly meant a device for mooring a ship, but may now be used to describe any source of stability or confidence. Our goalis to understand this process. Following the Career of Metaphor framework, figurative mappings are interpreted through astructure-mapping process, rendering common structure salient. As figurative terms become conventionalized, (1) the figurativesense becomes associated with the base term; and (2) there is shift from simile form to metaphor form. In two studies weinvestigated psycholinguistic properties that may influence this process: relationality and aptness. We use relative preferencefor the metaphor form as an estimate of degree of conventionalization; by determining the preferred form for a set of figuratives,we find evidence that both aptness and relationality influence this process. We speculate that figurative comparisons may giverise to new relational terms.