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Abstract Figurative language processing is a highly interdisciplinary research field, which shows a tendency to integrate linguistics with other disciplines. To advance the understanding of the state- of-the-art in this field, this study, using a bibliometric method, explored research fronts and development trends between 2012 and 2021 from three aspects of major specialties, research foci, and emerging trends. It was found that the major specialties in this area over the past decade include the cognitive pragmatic study of metaphor, atypical population, bilingualism, sarcasm, irony, idioms, embodied cognition, conventionality and literary metaphor with research foci such as ERP, fMRI, eye movement, N400, cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The emerging trends are mainly related to the studies of the modulating effect of familiarity and individual factors, processing of various language types, and interdisciplinary study with pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics.
Key words: figurative language processing; research foci; emerging trends; bibliometrics
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