Open-Ended Elaborations in Creative Metaphor - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 214

software—many other implementations of the broad principles of the ATT-Meta
theoretical account could be envisaged.
The plan of the chapter is as follows. Section 11.2 explains the ATT-Meta approach
and how it treats open-ended scenario elaborations. Section 11.3 explicates a crucial
element of that treatment, namely an “anti-analogy-extension” thesis. Section 11.4
goes into further ways in which ATT-Meta handles creativity during metaphor
understanding, and briefly discusses novel source/target pairings. It also touches on
metaphor generation. Section 11.5 discusses the suggestion advertised above about
the roles of analogy and metaphor in creative thinking. Section 11.6 concludes.

11.2 Open-Ended Elaboration and the ATT-Meta Approach

The ATT-Meta approach is mainly geared towards cases involving familiar metaphor-
ical views, such as the view of the mind as a physical region. However, the approach
is not much concerned with conventional metaphorical phraseology based on such
views, as in “The idea was at the back of his mind”. Rather, ATT-Meta it is geared
towards open-ended elaborations that rest on familiar metaphorical views. This is
best brought out by examples such as (1,2) and the following:

(3) The managers were getting cricks in their necks from talking up [to some people in

power over them] and down [to the managers' subordinates]. 10

It is common for abstract control relationships, especially in organizational set-
tings, to be metaphorically viewed in terms of relative vertical position of the people
concerned. However, someone having a crick in their neck is not a matter addressed
by this view, and no conventional metaphorical sense for “crick” appears in, for
instance, the Chambers dictionary. Only one example was found in GloWbE, only
one in the British National Corpus (BNC), 11 and only eight on the web, of metaphor-
ical cricks in necks being used metaphorically to describe mental/emotional states in
situations with no actual or potential turning of real heads. The BNC example was

The draught from Microsoft's increasingly popular Windows is giving rival software firms
a crick in the neck,

creatively exploiting the fact that a draught of air can cause a neck-crick, and that
movement of an object can cause a draught. The GloWbE example was

More likely, Romney as president would be a man with a strange crick in the neck, constantly
looking over his right shoulder to see which pickup truck full of movement conservatives
was about to run him over.

Annoying things and circumstances are often conventionally described as being a
“pain in the neck” or just “a pain”, and it might be possible to analyse (3) as resting

10 Goatly ([ 24 ]: p. 162). The example is from the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
11 Accessed via http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ .