It is generally believed that a metaphor tends to have a stronger emotional impact than a literal statement; however, there is no quantitative study establishing the extent to which this is true. Further, the mechanisms through which metaphors convey emotions are not well understood. We present the first data-driven study comparing the emotionality of metaphorical expressions with that of their literal counterparts. Our results indicate that metaphorical usages are, on average, significantly more emotional than literal usages. We also show that this emotional content is not simply transferred from the source domain into the target, but rather is a result of meaning composition and interaction of the two domains in the metaphor.

We test two experimental hypotheses.

• Hypothesis 1: metaphorical uses of words tend to convey more emotion than their literal paraphrases in the same context.
• Hypothesis 2: the metaphorical sense of a word tends to carry more emotion than the literal sense of the same word.

To test Hypothesis 1, we compare the emotional content of a metaphorically used word to that of its literal paraphrase in a fixed context, as in the following example.

a. Hillary brushed off the accusations.
b. Hillary dismissed the accusations.

To test Hypothesis 2, we compare the emotional content of the metaphorical sense of a word to a literal sense of that same word in its literal context, as follows.

a. Hillary brushed off the accusations.
b. He brushed off the snow.

Here, brushed off is metaphorical in the context of “accusations” but literal in the context of “snow”.