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This article reports the findings of 2 experiments examining how people process what speakers say and implicate. Speakers often literally say things that underdetermine what they intended to imply or communicate in context. Many scholars now argue that people analyze what speakers pragmatically say as part of their inferring what speakers pragmatically imply. Our studies examined this idea. We found that people take longer to interpret statements where what speakers imply differs from what they say than it does to comprehend what speakers say when those meanings are similar to what they imply. Listeners report that they indeed analyzed what speakers pragmatically, but not literally, said when interpreting speakers' intended messages. Our revised theory suggests that different kinds of pragmatic knowledge influence people's understandings of what speakers pragmatically say and what they pragmatically imply in context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars and medical professionals argue over the importance of metaphor in thinking about, and speaking of, cancer and other illnesses. Our study presents an analysis of the metaphors used by 6 women in their narratives of their experiences with cancer. We claim from our analyses that metaphorical talk about cancer reflects enduring metaphorical patterns of thought. Women used multiple, sometimes contradictory metaphors to conceptualize their complex cancer experiences. Many of their metaphors used to understand cancer are actually based on ordinary embodied experiences such that people still refer to the healthy body in trying to understand cancer even when their own bodies have been disrupted. We discuss the importance of our findings for understanding the relation between language and thought in regard to human illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the loss of irony caused by the national tragedy created by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. Questions over the relevance of irony; Evidence of the ironic turn of global politics which led to the attacks.

In 4 experiments we examined differences in how people understand ironic and metaphoric statements. Our hypothesis was that irony requires more complex inferencing to understand than does metaphor because irony reflects speakers' second-order, metarepresentational thoughts. We investigated the implications of this idea for how people process identical statements (e.g., "This one's really sharp") that had either ironic or metaphoric meaning in different contexts. Experiment 1 showed that people take longer to understand these statements when used ironically than when seen as metaphors. Experiment 2 revealed that people draw second-order metarepresentational inferences about speakers' intentions and beliefs when understanding ironies but not metaphors. Experiments 3 and 4 studied the processes and meaning products associated with understanding statements that were either simple ironies or metaphoric ironies. Overall, the data from these experiments lend support to the idea that irony is understood differently than metaphor partly because of the metarepresentational reasoning needed to infer ironic messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 7 articles in this collection describe new views of figurative language understanding. These articles differ in the types of figurative language they examine and address different linguistic levels (i.e., word vs. utterance) in the models proposed. Yet the articles make important claims about the use of contextual information in inferring figurative meaning and similarities and differences in processing figurative and literal language. These models are evaluated; places where the models conflict are noted; and ways these new ideas are improvements over more general, traditional theories of figurative language understanding are suggested. Several issues and topics are also raised that are not addressed in these articles but should be of concern to figurative language scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do readers' assumptions about authorial intentions play in text understanding? Dixon and Bortolussi (2001) challenged the idea that texts serve to communicate between authors and readers. Instead, they claimed that texts should be considered as artifacts, independent of the processes and conditions under which they are created. My article suggests several reasons why text understanding depends crucially on the communication of authors' intentions to readers. Although authorial intentions do not secure text meaning, people ordinarily seek both real and hypothetical authors' intentions as part of the meaning inferences drawn when reading. Scholars must not legislate that authorial intentions are unimportant in text interpretation. Instead, they should continue to empirically explore the extent to which assumptions about authorship shape cognitive and literary approaches to text understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the findings from three studies examining the role of mental imagery in interpreting poetic metaphor, specifically image metaphors that express mappings of concrete perceptual images from source domains to dissimilar target domains. The first study showed that ordinary readers interpret image metaphors by mapping concrete mental images across domains, but not by mapping more general knowledge across domains. The second and third studies demonstrated more precisely how people's detailed imagistic knowledge about different concepts underlies their understanding of image metaphors. These studies most generally illustrate the importance of concrete mental images in the interpretation of poetic metaphor and suggest how metaphor theories must be amended to account for the prominence of imagery in metaphor use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Describes empirical evidence in cognitive science on the importance of intentions in communication. Criticisms of the intentional view that have arisen in the humanities and social sciences; Resolution to the intentionalist controversy that recognizes the differing views on the idea of linguistic interpretation.

Most cases of verbal irony involve a situation in which a speaker says one thing and deliberately intends for his or her listener to infer an ironic meaning (e.g., "What lovely weather!" spoken in the midst of a downpour). However, there are occasions when listeners infer ironic meanings for utterances even though speakers do not intend their utterances to convey irony. For example, listeners may infer that the expression '7 would never be involved in any cheating" may have an ironic meaning if the speaker, unbeknownst to him or her, actually contributed to someone's cheating in a class exam. Numerous instances of dramatic irony in literature are based on situations like this in which listeners or readers recognize the unintended irony in what speakers say. We report the results of four experiments to show that people can recognize ironic meanings that are not intended by speakers and that processing unintended irony can be done quite easily precisely because speakers' utterances, unbeknownst to them, spontaneously create ironic situations. These findings have significant implications for psycholinguistic theories of irony comprehension and, more generally, for intentional theories of ordinary language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments are presented that investigate how people understand definite descriptions, such as The woman who can sing this song wilt get the job. The woman may refer to a specific woman, the referential use, or it may refer to any woman who fills the description who can sing this song, the attributive use. Experiment 1 showed that people can readily distinguish between the referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions in various discourse situations. Experiment 2 used a probe-re cognition task to assess the anaphoric inferences needed to interpret attributive and referential descriptions. The results showed that referential descriptions activate their explicit antecedents, whereas attributive descriptions activate an unspecified member of a class of objects or persons. In Experiment 3, subjects read stories ending with definite descriptions referring to famous people, such as The Prime Minister of England has a rough job. No search was required to understand attributive descrip tions because they are understood as designating their proper name, whereas referential descriptions secure a link to their antecedent in the discourse. Overall, these studies show how context is used in the interpretation of pragmatically ambiguous refe rring statements. The implications of these findings for theories of anaphora resolution are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within his theory of speech acts, Searle (1965, 1969) has suggested that certain conditions must hold true for a promise to be successfully made. These include: (a) that the speaker's utterance place him or her under an obligation to fulfill the promise because it is conventionally recognized as a promise; (b) that promises can be made only in situations where the addresses prefers that the speaker do the action promised; and (c) that the promise cannot be made in contexts where the speaker would have done the promised action in the normal course of events. We examined people's intuitions regarding these pragmatic conditions by looking at how people make and understand promises. The results from three studies showed that the first two of Searle's conditions are extremely important to maintain if a promise is to be made or understood. However, it appears that people can make promises about actions that would be performed in the normal course of events. As such, these studies support the idea that promises do not by themselves obligate a speaker, but are used to reaffirm previously existing, and often unstated, obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments are reported examining people's preferences for indirect speech acts in making requests in conversation. We investigated the effect of pre-requests (e.g., “Do you sell Marlboros?”) which prepares the addressee for an upcoming request, (e.g., “I'll take two packs”). We hypothesized that pre-requests function to remove any obstacles to compliance for the addressee and predicted that speakers would produce different kinds of request forms in situations where a pre-request has been made than in contexts where pre-requests were not present. The results of Experiment 1 showed this to be true for both service encounters and detour situations where a speaker must interrupt the ongoing activities of the addressee to insert the request. In Experiment 2 subjects read and ranked different conversational sequences unused in making indirect requests. The data indicated that in both service encounters and detour situations subjects most prefer conversations where the addressee in turn offers to fulfill the request implicit in the speaker's pre-request. Overall, these studies highlight the influence of conversational organization on people's linguistic behavior in making indirect speech acts in different social situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of whether people always analyze the literal meanings of idiomatic expressions, such as "You can let the cat out of the bag", (meaning "You can reveal the secret") was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1 subjects read stories that ended with either literal or nonliteral uses of idiomatic expressions. After reading each story, subjects made a sentence classification judgment for sentences that could be either a literal, nonliteral, or unrelated paraphrase of the last story sentence. Results indicated that subjects were primed on the nonliteral targets when they read idiomatic expressions, but were not primed on the literal targets. When subjects read literal uses of these expressions them was no priming on the literal targets. However, subjects' responses to the nonliteral targets were facilitated. Experiment 2 showed that these results were due to the way people actually process idiomatic expressions and cannot be attributed to some idiosyncratic aspect of the procedure. These results suggest that people do not ordinarily process the complete literal or compositional interpretations of idioms. Moreover, the results confirm the idea that people are automatically biased toward interpreting literal uses of idiomatic expressions conventionally, as idioms, before deriving their intended literal meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the process by which people interpret indirect requests. Impact of contextual effects on understanding indirect requests; Presence of the predictive power without context; Determination of comparative comprehension speed for metaphoric and literal sentences.

A recent theoretical note published in Metaphor and Symbolic Activity (Whaley & Holloway, 1996) argued for a distinction between analogies used for persuasion, or rebuttal analogies, and standard forms of analogy such as explanatory or expressive ones (Gentner, 1982, 1983). Whaley and Holloway proposed that two characteristics distinguish rebuttal analogies--argument and social attack. In this article, we take up these claims concerning rebuttal analogy and argue for an alternative, more encompassing view that distinguishes rebuttal analogies from other forms of analogy via the presence of irony. We propose that the two distinguishing factors suggested by Whaley and Holloway are instead reflecting the operation of irony in analogy. Noting the fundamental importance of irony in rebuttal analogies enables us to account for the various pragmatic functions of rebuttal analogies and why these forms express negative emotions. [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.

Focuses on the study of metaphor. Interactions among metaphor scholars; Importance of metaphor in linking the mind, body, language, and culture; Development of the learning ability of the students.