Archive for: December 13, 2008

UNDERSTANDING FIGURATIVE AND LITERAL LANGUAGE: THE GRADED SALIENCE HYPOTHESIS

Rachel Giora

Linguistics

Tel Aviv University

Tel Aviv 69978

Israel

ABSTRACT

In this study I test the prevalent claims among contemporary psycholinguists that understanding metaphor does not involve a special process, and that it is essentially identical to understanding literal language. Particularly, I examine the claims that figurative language does not involve processing the surface literal meaning (e.g., Gibbs, 1984), and that its comprehension is not processing-intensive, because it does not involve a trigger (e.g., Keysar, 1989). A critique, review and reinterpretation of a number of contemporary researches on literal and figurative language reveal that figurative and literal language use are governed by a general principle of salience: Salient meanings (e.g., conventional, frequent, familiar, enhanced by prior context) are processed first. Thus, for example, when the most salient meaning is intended (as in e.g., the figurative meaning of conventional idioms), it is accessed directly, without having to process the less salient (literal) meaning first (Gibbs, 1980).

High-level metonymy and linguistic structure[1]

Francisco Jos?Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez

Olga Isabel Díez Velasco

University of La Rioja

0. Introduction

Ever since George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) published their seminal work Metaphors We Live By, many cognitive linguists have devoted much of their research to exploring metaphorical systems in different languages. Metonymy, however, has received comparatively little attention. During the eighties and the nineties work on metonymy has mainly focused on setting up definitional and typological criteria (Croft, 1993; Dirven, 1993; Langacker, 1993; Kövecses and Radden, 1998, 1999), studying the metonymic grounding of metaphor (Barcelona, 2000; Radden, 2000), its role in conceptual interaction (Goossens, 1995; Ruiz de Mendoza, 1997a; Díez, 2000; Turner and Fauconnier, 2000) and in inferencing (Gibbs, 1994; Thornburg and Panther, 1997; Panther and Thornburg, 1998, 1999; Ruiz de Mendoza, 1999a; Pérez and Ruiz de Mendoza, 2001). Most of this research, however, has been concerned with the