Floating or Suggesting Ideas? A Large-Scale Contrastive Analysis of Metaphorical and Literal Verb-Object Constructions

Abstract

Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain limited, especially for near-synonymous expressions. We analyze 297 English verb-object pairs (e.g., float idea vs. suggest idea) in ~2M corpus sentences, examining their contextual usage. Using five NLP tools, we extract 2,293 cognitive and linguistic features capturing affective, lexical, syntactic, and discourse-level properties. We address: (i) whether features differ between metaphorical and literal contexts (cross-pair analysis), and (ii) whether individual VO pairs diverge internally (within-pair analysis). Cross-pair results show literal contexts have higher lexical frequency, cohesion, and structural regularity, while metaphorical contexts show greater affective load, imageability, lexical diversity, and constructional specificity. Within-pair analyses reveal substantial heterogeneity, with most pairs showing non-uniform effects. These results suggest no single, consistent distributional pattern that distinguishes metaphorical from literal usage. Instead, differences are largely construction-specific. Overall, large-scale data combined with diverse features provides a fine-grained understanding of metaphor-literal contrasts in VO usage.