Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Aggression speech patterns (ASP) strongly influence modern culture and ideology, they are regular source domain forconceptual metaphors. The study was based on THREAT-corpus (Russian language, 5 mln words) which was constructedto study ASP and contains fiction, non-fiction, news texts. The aim of the study is to investigate non-metaphoric andmetaphoric ASP in Russian. A semantic parser was designed to automatically process texts and construct conceptualrepresentations: They killed all the enemies (non-metaphoric)/He killed the time (metaphoric) [Ag-CAUSE HARM-Pat]. After extracting conceptual representations the parser evaluates them as aggressive or non-aggressive. An exampleMechanical toys pushed forward the imagination of scientists is evaluated as aggressive. Although this evaluation is false-positive, it reveals the conceptual metaphor where mental causation is described as voluntary action. This set of methodsmakes possible to collect, detect and describe ASP in diverse types of discourse and, consequently, to analyze the cognitivenature of aggression.