Aptness, familiarity, concreteness, and linguistic variables for 300 two-word metaphor combinations in context and in isolation

Familiarity, aptness, and concreteness norms for 300 two-word English metaphorical expressions (e.g., broken heart, early bird) in sentence context and in isolation were obtained from 129 participants. Familiarity was conceived as the extent to which participants had previously heard or read that expression. Aptness was conceived as the extent to which the vehicle captured important features of the topic. Concreteness was conceived as the extent to which the meaning conveyed by the vehicle could be perceived through senses or actions. In addition to these main variables, which are known to play a key role in metaphor comprehension, we provide frequency scores for the whole expression as well as for each constituent separately from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) database. We found that expressions presented in context were considered more familiar and more apt compared to when they were presented in isolation. Our findings showed that familiarity and frequency have a moderate positive correlation, while aptness and frequency have a weaker correlation. This supports the idea that familiarity, unlike aptness, is determined by the frequency of its use rather than by the relationship between the topic and vehicle. Lastly, we found a strong positive correlation between familiarity and aptness. This is compatible with previous studies suggesting that more apt metaphors are more frequently used in conversation, which in turn increases their familiarity. This set of norms, the first of its kind, serve as materials for research employing a variety of computational, behavioral, and neuroimaging methods aiming to tap the nature of metaphor comprehension and semantic composition.