Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Verb metaphor has received little attention compared to noun metaphor. But verbs may be more likely to take onmetaphoric meanings than are nouns. One indication of this is verb mutability verbs are more prone to adapt theirmeanings under semantic strain than nouns (Gentner & France, 1988; King & Gentner, 2019). We tested the minimalsubtraction hypothesis (Gentner & France, 1988), which proposes (1) domain-specific dimensions of a verbs meaning areadjusted before abstract relational structure, and (2) degree of adjustment increases with strain. In three experiments, wecollected paraphrases of simple sentences and using word2vec found progressively greater abstraction of verb (but notnoun) meaning with strain. For example, a typical paraphrase of The wagon limped was The cart creaked along; a typicalparaphrase of The fantasy limped was The imagination faltered, reflecting greater abstraction of limped. These findingssupport the minimal subtraction account of verb metaphoric extension.