The Use of Figurative Language in an Italian Dream Description Corpus

Computational Stylometry develops techniques that allow scholars to find out information about authors of texts by means of an automatic stylistic analysis. Indeed, each author’s style is unique, and no two authors are characterized by the same set of stylistic features. Several scholars focus on the analysis of different stylistic features and specific linguistic phenomena. The complex semantic aspects of figurative language remain one of the less investigated stylistic features, due to the lack of precise mapping between linguistic realizations and the concepts underlying the figurative language. Metaphors, similes, metonymies, and figurative language as a whole play an important role in how we mold our day-to-day reality, and they are represented through specific linguistic phenomena suitable to expressing specific conceptualization. Several linguistic devices and markers may highlight the presence of metaphorical expressions and other figures of speech. In this paper, we present research that exploits NooJ software and its linguistic resources to identify metaphors, oxymorons, and similes using a corpus of Italian dream descriptions, built by collecting dream descriptions from several blog users. Our goals, using NooJ’s features, are to build a domain dictionary able to represent lexical and semantic characteristics of metaphorical expressions, and to build model grammars able to recognize, extract, and tag these metaphors and figures of speech on the basis of different linguistic devices.