This article investigates the connection between multilingual experiences and creative metaphoric competence. As multilingualism has been shown to bring cognitive advantages in creative thinking, this article explores whether the ability to interpret creative metaphors differs in participants with less versus more multilingual experience. The…

To date, research in advertising has focussed almost exclusively on metaphor, with linguists and marketing scholars paying very little attention to alternative types of figurative expression. Beyond the finding that metaphor leads to an increased appreciation of advertisements, there has been surprisingly little research into how consumer response…

John Sinclair's Idiom Principle famously posited that most texts are largely composed of multi-word expressions that "constitute single choices" in the mental lexicon. At the time that assertion was made, little actual psycholinguistic evidence existed in support of that holistic, "single choice," view of formulaic language. In…

This article reports a study on metaphor comprehension by the international students whose first language is not English, while attending undergraduate lectures at a British university. Study participants identified words or multiword items that they found difficult in extracts from four academic lectures, and they interpreted metaphors from those…

It is generally accepted that formulaic sequences like "take the bull by the horns" serve an important function in discourse and are widespread in language. It is also generally believed that these sequences are processed more efficiently because single memorized units, even though they are composed of a sequence of individual words, can be…