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Comments on the article discussing the methods of studying proverbs. Literature of proverbs; Cognitive views on proverb understanding; Guidelines in studying the aspects of proverbs.

A major difficulty in studying figurative thought and language from an interdisciplinary perspective is that scholars can misunderstand the goals, methods, and terminology of researchers in academic fields different from their own. Our understanding of how people think, speak, and understand figuratively has indeed greatly benefited from interdisciplinary investigations published in Metaphor and Symbolic Activity. However, unfortunate misunderstandings of interdisciplinary ideas do arise, especially when scholars attempt to relate data from one field to theories proposed in neighboring disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psycholinguistic research has shown that, with appropriate context, people take no longer to understand metaphors than to understand semantically comparable literal language. This finding is often taken to suggest that identical mental processes drive the comprehension of both literal and metaphorical utterances. We suggest that this claim does not necessarily follow from the experimental results. Various masking processes could foster the "incorrect illusion'' of equivalence. However, a parsimonious account of the processes underlying comprehension can be motivated for both metaphorical and literal utterances. What makes metaphor "special" is in the products of comprehension, not in the process by which metaphorical meanings are understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a number of communicative goals that lead speakers to produce creative utterances. We argue that speakers produce utterances that incorporate, for example, metaphors, lexical innovations, or indirectness, because they wish to express their intended meanings as accurately as their language allows. Speakers, we suggest, also create new meanings because of the social demands on them. Finally, we discuss the consequences of creativity for theories of language production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the use of metaphor comprehension in the cognitive sciences. Process of comprehension for figurative language; Effects of metaphoric language on discourse processing; Correlation between metaphor and symbolic activity.