Interpreting Figurative Meaning

Gibbs, Raymond W.; Colston, Herbert L.

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139168779

Cited by 502 publications

(213 citation statements)

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“…The Pragma battery includes contextual inference questions with and without ToM demand, which make it possible to detect whether the child's social-pragmatic difficulties are more generally caused by contextual comprehension problems or only appear when understanding of the mind of others is required. Moreover, Pragma's questions have been categorized keeping in mind that social-pragmatic competence is the result of many interacting abilities (see Cummings, 2009;Gibbs & Colston, 2012;Perkins, 2007), and thus the misunderstanding of utterances is not necessarily caused by only one background factor (e.g. ToM) but the interaction of different kind of factors (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this field of study, context is conceptualised as a complex concept including linguistic, para-and extralinguistic, physical, cultural and cognitive aspects (Mercer, 2000;Prutting, 1982;Sperber & Wilson, 1995). In communicative situations, the ongoing conversation and subtle details of a situation shape the relevant contextual information constantly (Gibbs & Colston, 2012). When interpreting contextual factors, the ability to inference allows the interpreter to make connections between different kinds of information and link them together (Leinonen, Letts, & Smith, 2000;Sperber & Wilson, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Understanding Contextual and Social Meaning in Typically Developing Finnish-Speaking Four- To Eight-Year-Old Children

Loukusa

Mäkinen

Gabbatore

et al. 2017

Psychology of Language and Communication

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This study examined the development of social-pragmatic comprehension in 170 Finnish four-to eight-year-old children. The children were asked to respond to socially and contextually demanding questions targeting their social-pragmatic language processing, and to explain their correct answers in order to elicit their awareness of how they had derived the answers from the context. The results showed that the number of correct answers increased especially between the ages of four and seven years. We found that questions demanding contextual processing without mind-reading were the easiest to understand, followed by questions demanding processing of feelings of others and false beliefs. The questions demanding understanding of relevant language use and processing of contextual factors including mental states and intentions were the most challenging for the children. Between four and five years of age there was a remarkable developmental phase in children's ability to give proper explanations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Contextual and Social Meaning in Typically Developing Finnish-Speaking Four- To Eight-Year-Old Children

Loukusa

Mäkinen

Gabbatore

et al. 2017

Psychology of Language and Communication

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“…Taken together, the aforementioned studies suggest that online metaphor comprehension hinges on accessing the appropriate sense of the vehicle. Psycholinguistic models characterize the semantic processing of the topic and vehicle needed for metaphor comprehension (see Gibbs & Colston, 2012, for a review of such models). Of these models, one of the most comprehensive is Kintsch's (2000Kintsch's ( , 2001Kintsch's ( , 2008) predication algorithm, which we will discuss below.…”

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confidence: 99%

Novel metaphor comprehension: Semantic neighbourhood density interacts with concreteness

Al-Azary

2016

Mem Cogn

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Previous research suggests that metaphor comprehension is affected both by the concreteness of the topic and vehicle and their semantic neighbours (Kintsch, 2000;Xu, 2010). However, studies have yet to manipulate these 2 variables simultaneously. To that end, we composed novel metaphors manipulated on topic concreteness and semantic neighbourhood density (SND) of topic and vehicle. In Experiment 1, participants rated the metaphors on the suitability (e.g. sensibility) of their topic-vehicle pairings. Topic concreteness interacted with SND such that participants rated metaphors from sparse semantic spaces to be more sensible than those from dense semantic spaces and preferred abstract topics over concrete topics only for metaphors from dense semantic spaces. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used presentation deadlines and found that topic concreteness and SND affect the online processing stages associated with metaphor comprehension. We discuss how the results are aligned with established psycholinguistic models of metaphor comprehension.Keywords Language comprehension . Psycholinguistics . Semantics . Metaphor processingIn metaphor, unrelated concepts are paired to create a meaningful relation. For example, in time is money, the topic, or first concept, time and the vehicle, or second concept, money, are semantically distinct but the statement is nonetheless comprehensible even though literally untrue. Given that the topic and vehicle are unrelated, they each refer to a wide range of properties which vary in their relevance to the created meaning of the metaphor. Understanding a metaphor requires emphasizing the properties relevant to its meaning while suppressing the irrelevant ones (Black, 1962). For example, when reading a metaphor such as some lawyers are sharks, irrelevant property primes (e.g. sharks can be blue) hinder processing whereas relevant property primes (e.g. sharks can be ruthless) facilitate processing, as compared to no primes (McGlone & Manfredi, 2001). Moreover, metaphor primes (e.g. that defense lawyer is a shark) facilitate reading target sentences that refer to properties which are relevant to the metaphor's meaning (e.g. sharks are tenacious) but not sentences that refer to properties that are irrelevant to the metaphor's meaning (e.g. sharks are good swimmers; Gernsbacher, Keysar, Robertson, & Werner, 2001). Taken together, the aforementioned studies suggest that online metaphor comprehension hinges on accessing the appropriate sense of the vehicle. Psycholinguistic models characterize the semantic processing of the topic and vehicle needed for metaphor comprehension (see Gibbs & Colston, 2012, for a review of such models). Of these models, one of the most comprehensive is Kintsch's (2000Kintsch's ( , 2001Kintsch's ( , 2008) predication algorithm, which we will discuss below.The predication algorithm models the meaning of argument-predicate sentences, of which metaphor is an example, in semantic space (Kintsch, 2001). In this approach, latent semantic analysis (LSA) is used to model ...

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“…Such a convention can always be successfully violated. If Gibbs and Colston (2012) are to be trusted, empirical studies de nitely support this conclusion. As they put it: "To date [.…”

Section: The Argument From Token Invariancementioning

confidence: 98%

Compositionality and sandbag semantics

Unnsteinsson

2014

Synthese

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It is a common view that radical contextualism about linguistic meaning is incompatible with a compositional explanation of linguistic comprehension. Recently, some philosophers of language have proposed theories of 'pragmatic' compositionality challenging this assumption. This paper takes a close look at a prominent proposal of this kind due to François Recanati. The objective is to give a plausible formulation of the view. The major results are threefold. First, a basic distinction that contextualists make between mandatory and optional pragmatic processes needs to be revised. Second, the pragmatic theory can withstand a Davidsonian objection only by rejecting the importance of a distinction between primitive and non-primitive semantic items. Thirdly, however, the theory is now open to a worry about how it should be understood: either the theory consists in a very broad functionalist generalization about communication, which makes it explanatorily inert, or it boils down to a highly particularist view about linguistic meaning. Finally, I argue that Recanati's notion of 'occasion meaning' is problematic and suggest replacing it with the notion of speaker meaning, which is explanatorily more basic.

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Interpreting Figurative Meaning

Cited by 502 publications

References 0 publications

Understanding Contextual and Social Meaning in Typically Developing Finnish-Speaking Four- To Eight-Year-Old Children

Understanding Contextual and Social Meaning in Typically Developing Finnish-Speaking Four- To Eight-Year-Old Children

Novel metaphor comprehension: Semantic neighbourhood density interacts with concreteness

Compositionality and sandbag semantics

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