Grice's Café: coffee, cream, and metaphor comprehension

Abstract

Some theorists argue that Grice's account of metaphor is intended as a rational reconstruction of a more general inferential process of linguistic communication (i.e., conversational implicature). However, there is a multi-source trend which treats Grice's remarks on metaphor as unabashedly psychological. The psychologized version of Grice's view runs in serial: compute what is said; reject what is said as contextually inappropriate; run pragmatic processing to recover contextually appropriate meaning. Citing data from reaction time studies, critics reject Grice's project as psychologically implausible. The alternative model does not rely on serial processing or input from what is said (i.e., literal meaning). I argue the serial processing model and its criticisms turn on a misunderstanding of Grice's account. My aim is not to defend Grice's account of metaphor per se, but to reinterpret auxiliary hypotheses attributed to him. I motivate two points in relation to my reinterpretation. The first point concerns the relationship between competence and performance-based models. To the second point: Several of the revised hypotheses make predictions that are largely consistent with psycho and neurolinguistic data.

Lexical representation of the notion coffee in present-day English (on the material of lexicographical sources)

“…The research was carried out within the structural paradigm of linguistics in view of the anthropocentric approach to language in modern science (Kovác, 2011;Peftieva, 2016;Stanojević, 2009). It means the acknowledgment of the idea that in order to explain the semantics of the lexical units' denoting coffee and establish the principles of coffee nomination and grouping of the units under analysis, one should take into account their mental basis, or the corresponding notion (Borysov and Mai, 2022;Genovesi, 2023;Zheng, 2022).…”

“…It should be noted that the investigation of coffee as a food product is rather topical in culinary, commercial knowledge and medicine (Cappelletti et al, 2015;Nawrot et al, 2003;Pendergrast, 2010;RCH, 2019;Sunarharum, 2020). As for linguistic investigations, there are rare works performed in the area of sociolinguistics (Gaudio, 2003;Zahra, 2021) or communicative linguistics (Genovesi, 2023), however, not in lexical semantics. In Gaudio (2003), the object of the research is a social practice of coffee talk or casual conversations of representatives of the middle-class who discuss their matters in the situation of coffee consumption.…”

“…In the context of our research it is noteworthy to mention two reasons for this, namely Coffee Type (e.g., Arabica coffee), and Place/Location where this or that coffee comes from (Zahra, 2021). Finally, in the work by Genovesi (2023), the lexical component coffee is taken as a part of metaphorical expression widely used in day-to-day communication and is not a separate object of the research, which is primarily devoted to the problems of interpretation and comprehension.…”