Abstraction in Creativity
How does word specificity affect metaphor evaluation? How do language models interpret novel combinations of concepts? What do unconventional word forms reveal about language use during play?
Research question 1: how does specificity interact with concreteness in the construction of familiar metaphors ?
How words and concepts can be combined, reinterpreted, and transformed to create new meanings.
Linguistic creativity draws on our ability to connect familiar concepts in unfamiliar ways. ABSTRACTION has explored this ability through research on metaphor, novel noun–noun compounds, and unconventional word forms produced during language-based play. These studies examine how semantic properties and existing knowledge contribute to the interpretation of new expressions.
1. Specificity contributes to how metaphors are evaluated
Metaphors invite us to understand one concept through another. ABSTRACTION has investigated how word specificity contributes to metaphor evaluation alongside concreteness and frequency.
In a study of Italian predicate metaphors conducted with Paola Vernillo, we compared metaphorical and literal expressions and collected judgments on several aspects of their interpretation. The findings indicate that greater specificity is associated with lower perceived familiarity and semantic relatedness, with stronger effects in metaphorical expressions.
These findings suggest that metaphor evaluation depends partly on how specific or general the words are. They also highlight the importance of considering specificity together with frequency and concreteness when investigating figurative language.
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Study on specificity and metaphor evaluation — under review. Publication link to be added when available.
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Related conference presentations on specificity and metaphor quality
2. Novel compounds reveal the challenges of combining concepts
Combining familiar words can produce an unfamiliar expression whose meaning must be inferred. For example, interpreting a noun–noun compound requires identifying an implicit relationship between its constituents: a carrot cake is a cake made with carrots.
Our research with Giulia Rambelli and colleagues investigated whether large language models can identify these relationships in established English compounds and transfer their interpretations to similar but novel combinations.
The models tested interpreted some semantic relationships more successfully than others and performed better with compounds involving concrete concepts. However, they showed substantial limitations when transferring familiar relationships to novel compounds.
This work highlights a challenge in linguistic creativity: interpreting a new combination requires more than recognizing its individual words. It also requires identifying how their meanings relate and whether a familiar pattern applies to the new expression.
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3. Language-based play provides a window onto unconventional word forms
Language-based games provide opportunities to observe how people use words outside tightly controlled experimental tasks. Alongside conventional forms, participants may produce spelling errors and other departures from standard written language.
Our research with Adele Loia and colleagues examined misspelling patterns in data collected through gamification, considering their relationship with participants’ sociodemographic characteristics.
This work complements our research on linguistic creativity by examining variation in the forms people produce during play. An important distinction is between unintended errors and deliberate linguistic innovations: unconventional spelling alone does not establish that a form is creative.
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