Resumen
Literal language is commonly defined in terms of direct meaning, i.e., any literal utterance must convey a unique meaning. Such meaning has to be the one conventionally accepted to guarantee a successful communication. Figurative language, on the other hand, could be regarded as the opposite of literal language. Thus, whereas the latter is assumed to communicate a direct and explicit meaning, figurative language is related to the communication of veiled or implicit meanings. For instance, the word pozolero (stewmaker), which literally refers to a person who cooks a traditional Mexican food, when it is used in a figurative utterance, it can refer to different concepts, which are hardly related to food. Therefore, it can work instead of hitman, murderer, drug dealer, and others, in such a way its literal meaning is intentionally deviated in favor of secondary interpretations. In this regard, we are focused on analyzing the use of figurative language in an atypical context: drug trafficking. To this end, a corpus about narco language in Spanish was built. This corpus was used to train a word embedding model to identify creative ways to name narco-related concepts. The results show that various concepts are commonly expressed through figurative devices, such as metaphor, metonymy, or mental imagery. This fact corroborates that figurative language is quite recurrent in our daily communication, regardless of the context. In addition, we show how this creativity can be recognized by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.