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 processes in language and cognition, from pragmatic inference to abstraction and embodied simulation. 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 997 metaphors in Italian enriched with rating and corpus-based measures (from familiarity to lexical frequency), derived by collecting stimuli used across 11 studies. It includes both everyday and literary metaphors, varying in structure and semantic domains. Dataset validation comprised correlations between familiarity and other measures. The Figurative Archive has several aspects of novelty: it is increased in size compared to previous resources; it includes a novel measure of inclusiveness, to comply with current recommendations for non-discriminatory language use; it is displayed in a web-based interface, with features for a flexible and customized consultation. We provide guidelines for using the Archive in future metaphor studies, in the spirit of open science.