9. Happy New War – The role of salient meanings and salience-based interpretations in processing utterances

Abstract

Whether our cognitive machinery is adept at swiftly and accurately homing in on a single, contextually appropriate interpretation, as assumed by The Direct Access View (Gibbs 1986(Gibbs , 1994 and Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995), or whether it is less efficient at sieving out interpretations based on salient (coded and prominent) word and phrase meanings which might be activated irrespective of contextual information and speakers' intent, as proposed by The Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora 1997(Giora , 1999(Giora , 2003 is an unresolved issue within pragmatics and psycholinguistics. Within the field of literal and non-literal language, this translates into whether accessible but incompatible meanings and messagelevel interpretations are involved even when contextual information is highly supportive of an alternative interpretation. More specifically, the debate concerning the processing, for instance, of ironic, metaphoric, optimally innovative as well as negated utterances revolves around the role of salient meanings and salience-based yet incompatible interpretations in shaping contextually compatible but non-salient interpretations in contexts strongly benefitting such interpretations. This chapter reviews state-of-the-art research involved in this debate, looking into the role of salient but incompatible meanings and salience-based but incompatible interpretations in verbal and non-verbal communication.