Inferring Pragmatic Messages from Metaphor

Gibbs, Raymond W.; Tendahl, Markus; Okonski, Lacey

doi:10.2478/v10016-011-0002-9

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…The reconstruction of a minimal relevance relation (Macagno 2018) between the vehicle and the purpose of the utterance (Gibbs et al 2011) can explain the "strong implicatures" that metaphorical utterances license, but cannot explain fully the argumentative effects of some metaphors. The arguments that result from this level of understanding do not exhaust the argumentative effect of the metaphorical move: if the latter were only a strategy for expressing an argument that can be conveyed through non-metaphorical means, there wouldn't be much reason to use metaphor in the first place (Reinhart 1976: 392).…”

Section: Metaphors Communicate Argumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How can metaphors communicate arguments?

Macagno

2020

Intercultural Pragmatics

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Metaphors are considered as instruments crucial for persuasion. However, while many studies and works have focused on their emotive, communicative, and persuasive effects, the argumentative dimension that represents the core of their “persuasiveness” is almost neglected. This paper addresses the problem of explaining how metaphors can communicate arguments, and how it is possible to reconstruct and justify them. To this purpose, a distinction is drawn between the arguments that are communicated metaphorically and interpreted based on relevance considerations, and the ones that are triggered implicitly by the use of a metaphorical expression. In both cases, metaphorical arguments are reconstructed through different patterns of argument, called argumentation schemes (Walton, Reed and Macagno 2008). However, while the purpose of a metaphorical sequence of discourse (called metaphorical move) can guide and justify the reconstruction of the argument that can sufficiently support the intended conclusion in a persuasive move, a more complex analysis is needed for analyzing the additional inferences that a metaphorical move can trigger. These inferences are claimed to represent part of the connotation of the metaphorical expression and can be captured through its most frequent collocations, determinable using some tools of the corpus linguistics.

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Section: Metaphors Communicate Argumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How can metaphors communicate arguments?

Macagno

2020

Intercultural Pragmatics

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“…We do not just comprehend metaphors to derive their metaphorical meanings, but interpret them to infer pragmatically relevant messages in different discourse contexts. For example, studies have demonstrated that people take more time to understand the metaphorical statement "My lawyer is also a shark" when that remark contradicted a previously stated belief (e.g., "Lawyers are always kind") than when the metaphor strengthened a previously stated idea (e.g., "Lawyers are persistent") (Gibbs et al, 2011). The total time to understand a metaphor incorporates our assessment of its validity and appropriateness in the context in which it appears.…”

Section: Resistance To Metaphors I N Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How We Resist Metaphors

Gibbs

Siman

2021

Lang. cogn.

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Most people love metaphor, but we still sometimes find ourselves resisting their presence or meanings for various reasons. We resist metaphors both as a general strategy (e.g., “Metaphors are meaningless” or “Mixed metaphor are incoherent”), and as a response to some metaphors in very specific situational and discourse contexts (e.g., “I do not like the idea that my cancer treatment is seen as a war against my body”). People resist metaphors they have produced, metaphors imposed on them by others, and metaphors that they find to be offensive or that negatively stigmatize other individuals, or groups of people. But metaphors are also resisted for their lack of explanatory power in, for instance, scientific communities. There are also many ironies associated with metaphor resistance, such as consciously resisting some metaphor while still being governed by that same metaphor in our unconscious thinking and actions. Most generally, though, metaphor resistance is its own kind of metaphorical action. Taking a dynamic systems approach to resistance to metaphors, we discuss several implications of these observations for theories of metaphorical thought and language.

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“…We often fail to appreciate people's pragmatic experiences of language in our quest to test specific hypotheses from linguistic pragmatics. To take one example, studies show that people take different times to interpret a metaphorical statement, such as "Lawyers are also sharks, " depending on whether that expression is intended to simply affirm a pre-existing belief in some discourse, add new information, or contradict a previously asserted belief (Gibbs et al, 2011). People do not simply understand a metaphor as only expressing a metaphorical meaning, but interpret it more precisely in terms of its specific pragmatic messages in context (e.g., that a speaker wishes to strengthen an existing assumption, add new information, or contradict a previously stated belief about some topic).…”

Section: The Superficiality and Richness Of Pragmatic Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatics Always Matters: An Expanded Vision of Experimental Pragmatics

Gibbs¹,

Colston

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Much of the work in experimental pragmatics is devoted to testing empirical hypotheses that arise within the study of linguistic and philosophical pragmatics. The focus in much of this work is focused on those aspects of communicated meaning that are "inferred" rather than understood through linguistic "coding" processes. Under this view, pragmatic meanings emerge secondarily after purely linguistic meanings are accessed or computed. Our aim in this article is to greatly broaden the scope of experimental pragmatic studies by calling for much greater emphasis on the complete pragmatics of language use. Pragmatics is continuously present and constrains people's real-time production and processing of language in context. Experimental pragmatics should attend more to the particularities of pragmatic experience through closer examination of the people we study, the specific tasks used to assess understanding, as well as the actual complex meanings people interpret in diverse contexts. The many specifics of human pragmatics demand the study and theoretical inclusion of many bodily, linguistic, and situational factors that make up each instance of meaning making.

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Inferring Pragmatic Messages from Metaphor

Cited by 15 publications

References 13 publications

How can metaphors communicate arguments?

How can metaphors communicate arguments?

How We Resist Metaphors

Pragmatics Always Matters: An Expanded Vision of Experimental Pragmatics

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