Abstraction in CREATIVITY
Abstraction in CREATIVITY
Metaphors are a staple in linguistic creativity, and yet, little we know about what makes good (or bad) metaphors.
Research shows that complex and abstract concepts are often compared to easier and more concrete ones through metaphors. For instance, we talk about Covid as “a fight against an invisible enemy”, where both, the fight and the enemy, rather concrete concepts, do not involve any literal battle nor soldiers. While the levels of concreteness of metaphor terms has been investigated, there is no research or indication on the levels of specificity of metaphor terms.
We argue that concreteness and specificity critically affect the perceived effectiveness of metaphors produced in different contexts and with different communicative goals. A good metaphor produced with the goal of making the reader laugh may use word specificity to create hilarious scenarios, as in the example below, where food critique expert A. Gill describes a dish from an Egyptian restaurant:
“belly buttons in a soup of fake tan”
A less vivid and more generic formulation of this metaphor would not have been as effective in the same context (e.g., the dish being generically described as “round entities in a fluid”).
Conversely, a metaphor produced with the intent of explaining a difficult abstract topic will probably be more effective if it used generic words, which readers can mold onto their own knowledge, to better understand the intended meaning. For instance, Covid may be explained to a child as a small bug (a rather generic expression) rather than, for instance, a small coleoptera (a specific type of bug).
ABSTRACTION will investigate how specificity affects the construction of effective metaphors, which is a goal that taps directly in the more general endeavor of unpacking the mechanisms of human creativity. Such mechanisms can in turn be implemented in software for computer-assisted writing, where effective metaphors can be suggested on the basis of statistical language models that take into account word concreteness and specificity among other factors.
The results of these studies will be published in academic journals that can be found on the academic website of this project, and will be summarized here on this website in short articles.