Metaphors are proven to have stronger emotional impact than literal expressions. Although this conclusion is shown to be promising in benefiting various NLP applications, the reasons behind this phenomenon are not well studied. This paper conducts the first study in exploring how metaphors convey stronger emotion than their literal counterparts. We find that metaphors are generally more specific than literal expressions. The more specific property of metaphor can be one of the reasons for metaphors' superiority in emotion expression. When we compare metaphors with literal expressions with the same specificity level, the gap of emotion expressing ability between both reduces significantly. In addition, we observe specificity is crucial in literal language as well, as literal language can express stronger emotion by making it more specific.

翻译：隐喻已被证实比字面表达具有更强的情感影响。尽管这一结论在提升各类自然语言处理应用效果方面展现出潜力，但该现象背后的原因尚未得到充分研究。本文首次探究隐喻如何比其对应的字面表达传达更强的情感。我们发现隐喻通常比字面表达更具具体性。隐喻的这一具体性特征可能是其情感表达能力优越的原因之一。当我们将隐喻与具有相同具体性水平的字面表达进行比较时，两者在情感表达能力上的差距显著缩小。此外，我们观察到具体性在字面语言中也至关重要，因为字面语言通过增强具体性也能表达更强的情感。