Video Recordings

Similes are both neglected and important. Meaning in natural language is a puzzling mixture of logical and analogical processes, so the preposition "like" assumes great importance. Among other things, it enables language users to say new things, or to talk about old things in new ways. Simile are distinguished from comparisons on the one hand and metaphors on the other hand. Most writers in the metaphor industry treat similes as sort of 'second-class metaphors' -- and they say wrong things, due to carelessness and neglect of evidence. In  this talk I present some empirical evidence for the analogical functioning of language, involving both comparisons and similes.