ABSTRACT
Metaphor is an elegant, concise, often startling communicative form which is employed by a speaker as a means of conveying a state of affairs to a hearer; as such, it deserves to be analysed as a speech-act, with a particular illocutionary intent and perlocutionary effect. This paper describes a hybrid symbolic/connectionist model of metaphor (SAPPER by Veale & Keane, 1993), which incorporates elements of the belief ascription model of (Wilks, Barnden & Wang, 1991). This extended framework provides a suitable computational environment for analysing the illocutionary intent of the speaker, and perlocutionary effect upon the hearer’s belief space, of a broad class of metaphors with an observable ameliorative/pejorative connotation.
