Metaphors' journeys across time and genre: tracking the evolution of literary metaphors with temporal embeddings

Metaphors are a distinctive feature of literary language, yet they remain less studied experimentally than everyday metaphors. Moreover, previous psycholinguistic and computational approaches overlooked the temporal dimension, although many literary metaphors were coined centuries apart from contemporary readers. This study innovatively applies tools from diachronic distributional semantics to assess whether the processing costs of literary metaphors varied over time and genre. Specifically, we used the Word2Vec algorithm and period-specific literary and nonliterary corpora, for a total of 124 million tokens, to generate word embeddings. Using these embeddings, we modeled changes in the semantic similarity between topics and vehicles of 515 19th-century literary metaphors, taking this measure as a proxy for metaphor processing demands. Overall, semantic similarity, and hence metaphor processing demands, remained stable over time. However, genre played a key role: metaphors appeared more difficult (i.e., lower topic-vehicle similarity) in modern literary contexts than in 19th-century literature, but easier (i.e., higher topic-vehicle similarity) in today's nonliterary language (e.g., the web) than in 19th-century nonliterary texts. This pattern was further shaped by semantic features of metaphors' individual terms, such as vector coherence and semantic neighborhood density. Collectively, these findings align with broader linguistic changes in Italian, such as the stylistic simplification of modern literature, which may have increased metaphor processing demands, and the high creativity of the web's language, which seems to render metaphor more accessible.