  Given a specific discourse, which discourse properties trigger the use of
metaphorical language, rather than using literal alternatives? For example,
what drives people to say "grasp the meaning" rather than "understand the
meaning" within a specific context? Many NLP approaches to metaphorical
language rely on cognitive and (psycho-)linguistic insights and have
successfully defined models of discourse coherence, abstractness and affect. In
this work, we build five simple models relying on established cognitive and
linguistic properties -- frequency, abstractness, affect, discourse coherence
and contextualized word representations -- to predict the use of a metaphorical
vs. synonymous literal expression in context. By comparing the models' outputs
to human judgments, our study indicates that our selected properties are not
sufficient to systematically explain metaphorical vs. literal language choices.
