Figurative Archive: an open dataset and web-based application for the study of metaphor

Research on metaphor has steadily increased over the last decades, as this phenomenon opens a window into a range of linguistic and cognitive processes. At the same time, the demand for rigorously constructed and extensively normed experimental materials increased as well. Here, we present the Figurative Archive, an open database of 996 metaphors in Italian enriched with ratings and corpus-based measures (from familiarity to semantic distance and preferred interpretations), derived by collecting stimuli used across 11 studies. It includes both everyday and literary metaphors, varying in structure and semantic domains, and is validated based on correlations between familiarity and other measures. The Archive has several aspects of novelty: it is increased in size compared to previous resources; it offers a measure of metaphor inclusiveness, to comply with recommendations for non-discriminatory language use; it is displayed in a web-based interface, with features for a customized consultation. We provide guidelines for using the Archive to source materials for studies investigating metaphor processing and the relationships between metaphor features in humans and computational models.