How do words vs. images construct and represent metaphor.

Metaphorical similarity is a peculiar type of semantic relation, based on a very limited number of features that are shared by the two metaphor terms. The nature of these shared features is still largely unknown. Similarly, we know little about whether different modes of metaphor expression (e.g., images, language) use the same types of features to construct metaphors. I hereby report a series of distributional analyses based on a representative sample of pictorial and linguistic metaphors. Three different types of similarity are operationalized through three different distributional methodsthat are based on the same underlying principle (the distributional hypothesis) but model semantic representations based on different information. Based on such analyses I show that the pictorial and the linguistic modes of expression afford different ways to construct metaphors, because they tend to exploit different types of features that are shared by the metaphor terms. The results are discussed within a cognitive linguistic framework, in which I defend a multi-layered view of conceptual metaphor, in which image schemas might constitute the most generic layer of representation, at which the difference between pictorial and linguistic metaphors may disappear.