“There's millions of them”: hyperbole in everyday conversation

McCarthy, Michael; Carter, Ronald

doi:10.1016/s0378-2166(03)00116-4

Cited by 147 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…scenarios in which a speaker bought an item that cost s dollars and says it cost u dollars, where u ≥ s. They then rate how likely it is that the buyer thinks the item was too expensive (Experiment 2: Affective Subtext). We focused on the affect of an item being too expensive because previous findings suggest that hyperbole is more often used to communicate negative rather than positive attitudes (1,16). Results showed that utterances u where u > s are rated as significantly more likely to convey affect than utterances where u = s [F (1,25) = 12.57; P < 0.005].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We aim to capture two well-known phenomena regarding number interpretation: hyperbole and pragmatic halo. Hyperbole is a figure of speech that uses exaggeration to convey emphasis and emotion (16). Despite being literally false, hyperbolic utterances are readily understood and serve purposes such as establishing social closeness and expressing opinions (1,(16)(17)(18).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hyperbole is a figure of speech that uses exaggeration to convey emphasis and emotion (16). Despite being literally false, hyperbolic utterances are readily understood and serve purposes such as establishing social closeness and expressing opinions (1,(16)(17)(18). Pragmatic halo refers to people's tendency to interpret round numbers such as 100 imprecisely and sharp numbers such as 103 precisely (19).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Nonliteral understanding of number words

Kao¹,

Bergen

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

125

107

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One of the most puzzling and important facts about communication is that people do not always mean what they say; speakers often use imprecise, exaggerated, or otherwise literally false descriptions to communicate experiences and attitudes. Here, we focus on the nonliteral interpretation of number words, in particular hyperbole (interpreting unlikely numbers as exaggerated and conveying affect) and pragmatic halo (interpreting round numbers imprecisely). We provide a computational model of number interpretation as social inference regarding the communicative goal, meaning, and affective subtext of an utterance. We show that our model predicts humans' interpretation of number words with high accuracy. Our model is the first to our knowledge to incorporate principles of communication and empirically measured background knowledge to quantitatively predict hyperbolic and pragmatic halo effects in number interpretation. This modeling framework provides a unified approach to nonliteral language understanding more generally.pragmatics | computational modeling I magine a friend describing a new restaurant where she recently dined. Your friend says, "It took 30 minutes to get a table." You are likely to interpret this to mean she waited ∼30 min. Suppose she says: "It took 32 minutes to get a table." You are more likely to interpret this to mean exactly 32 min. Now, suppose she says: "It took a million years to get a table." You will probably interpret this to mean that the wait was shorter than a million years, but importantly that she thinks it took much too long. One of the most fascinating facts about communication is that people do not always mean what they say-a crucial part of the listener's job is to understand an utterance even when its literal meaning is false. People's ability to interpret nonliteral language poses a critical puzzle for research on language understanding.A rich body of literature in psychology and linguistics has examined how people use and understand nonliteral language (1-4). However, most of the work has been qualitative, with little focus on analyzing aspects of an utterance that predict the quantitative details of people's figurative interpretations. Here, we present a computational model that formalizes and integrates three general principles of language and communication to explain the basis of nonliteral language understanding. First, speakers and listeners communicate with the assumption that their interlocutors are rational and cooperative agents; second, listeners assume that speakers choose utterances to maximize informativeness with respect to their communicative goals; third, speaker and listener use common ground-their shared knowledge of the world-to communicate effectively. The first principle has been formalized by a recent body of work on rational speech act (RSA) models, which views pragmatic language understanding as probabilistic inference over recursive social models and explains a range of phenomena in human pragmatic reasoning (5-8). We go beyond the previous formal wor...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Nonliteral understanding of number words

Kao¹,

Bergen

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

125

107

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…hyperbole, extreme case formulation, auxesis, among others; cf. Pomerantz, 1986;McCarthy and Carter, 2004;Norrick, 2004), they are all produced and interpreted similarly. Despite the fact that we use the general term understatement to refer to the phenomenon which is opposite to overstatement in terms of the contextual effects produced (i.e.…”

Section: Overstatementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Operations in Tropes: The Case of Parameterisation

Herrero-Ruiz¹

EPiC Series in Language and Linguistics

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Over the last few years, the study of cognitive operations from both a pragmatic and a cognitive angle (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2014) has gradually received more and more attention. According to Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera (2014), parameterisation is based on world knowledge and is cued by the linguistic expression, resulting in the fixation of a generic value which is otherwise undefined to a greater or lesser extent, as in John drinks standing for 'John usually drinks alcohol' or Something has happened meaning 'something bad has happened. ' Following Herrero (2009), in this paper we attempt to analyse how parameterisation applies in some tropes (overstatement, understatement, euphemism, and dysphemism) by placing constraints on how far the operations that underlie them, strengthening and mitigation, can go.The examples have been extracted from a multi-faced corpus compiled from The British National Corpus, The Corpus of American English, and Google searches.

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“…As McCarthy and Carter (2004) stated, hyperbole (also referred to as exaggeration or overstatement in order to achieve some effect) has been studied in rhetoric and in literary contexts, but only relatively recently in banal, everyday contexts like the one under analysis here. Hyperbole is quite a common strategy among reviewers due to its strong emotional potential for the reader.…”

Section: The Role Of Evaluative Adjectives As Opinion-formers/providersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Formation of the Image of Top-Ranked Hotels through Real Online Customer Reviews: A Corpus-Based Study of Evaluative Adjectives as Image-Formers/Providers

Marzá¹

2013

IJEL

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This study is grounded on a corpus-based analysis of evaluative adjectives as hotel image-formers/providers conducted from a multifaceted yet complementary perspective which departs from the notion of destination image formation (Gartner, 1993;Baloglu & McCleary, 1999, Gylling, 2004 among others) focused on a specific aspect, that of the hotel of destination, and to a specific genre, the online (hotel) customer review. The corpus of study, which contains more than 250 000 words, is made up of more than 1200 online reviews of top-ranked hotels retrieved from the popular website Tripadvisor.com. WordSmith Tools 5.0 was used to analyse and categorise the evaluative adjectives in the corpus from three perspectives: firstly, adjectives were initially classified according to frequency and/or saliency criteria; secondly, in terms of their implicit degree of positivity/negativity; and thirdly, according to the kind of evaluation provided. Subsequently, the main features evaluated in any hotel online customer review (value, rooms, location, cleanliness, and service) and their frequently associated adjectival evaluative acts were analysed to determine their collocational behavior and thus the way such appraisal patterns contribute to "destination image formation", that is, to form an impression on specific aspects of top-ranked hotels. The paper is aimed at showing that evaluative adjectives in online customer reviews are critical in the interpretation of subjective expected values, and that a correct understanding of the kind of image they transmit in the tourist-to tourist digital interaction through reviews provides an opportunity for destination marketers, in this case hoteliers, to enhance the psychological and symbolic values as well as the benefits of the destination according to improved communication strategies and language usage.

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“There's millions of them”: hyperbole in everyday conversation

Cited by 147 publications

References 23 publications

Nonliteral understanding of number words

Nonliteral understanding of number words

Cognitive Operations in Tropes: The Case of Parameterisation

The Formation of the Image of Top-Ranked Hotels through Real Online Customer Reviews: A Corpus-Based Study of Evaluative Adjectives as Image-Formers/Providers

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