Interpreting Figurative Meaning

Interpreting Figurative Meaning PDF Author: Raymond W. Gibbs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107024358
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Interpreting Figurative Meaning explores interdisciplinary debates on the ways in which humans comprehend figurative language in everyday life.

Interpreting Figurative Meaning

Interpreting Figurative Meaning PDF Author: Raymond W. Gibbs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107024358
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Interpreting Figurative Meaning explores interdisciplinary debates on the ways in which humans comprehend figurative language in everyday life.

Interpreting Figurative Meaning

Interpreting Figurative Meaning PDF Author: Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107380073
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Interpreting Figurative Meaning critically evaluates the recent empirical work from psycholinguistics and neuroscience examining the successes and difficulties associated with interpreting figurative language. There is now a huge, often contradictory literature on how people understand figures of speech. Gibbs and Colston argue that there may not be a single theory or model that adequately explains both the processes and products of figurative meaning experience. Experimental research may ultimately be unable to simply adjudicate between current models in psychology, linguistics and philosophy of how figurative meaning is interpreted. Alternatively, the authors advance a broad theoretical framework, motivated by ideas from 'dynamical systems theory', that describes the multiple, interacting influences which shape people's experiences of figurative meaning in discourse. This book details past research and theory, offers a critical assessment of this work and sets the stage for a new vision of figurative experience in human life.

Using Figurative Language

Using Figurative Language PDF Author: Herbert L. Colston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110710565X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Gathers decades of research on figurative language cognition to answer the question, 'Why don't people just say what they mean?'

Relevance, Pragmatics and Interpretation

Relevance, Pragmatics and Interpretation PDF Author: Kate Scott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108418635
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Showcases recent research by leading scholars working within the relevance-theoretic pragmatics framework.

The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics

The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics PDF Author: Michael Spivey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139536141
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 1453

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Book Description
Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics.

Figurative Language Comprehension

Figurative Language Comprehension PDF Author: Herbert L. Colston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135625816
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Figurative language, such as verbal irony, metaphor, hyperbole, idioms, and other forms is an increasingly important subfield within the empirical study of language comprehension and use. Figurative Language Comprehension: Social and Cultural Influences is an edited scholarly book that ties together recent research concerning the social and cultural influences on figurative language cognition. These influences include gender, cultural differences, economic status, and inter-group effects, among others. The effects these influences have on people's use, comprehension, and even processing of figurative language, comprise the main theme of this volume. No other book offers such a look at the social and cultural influences on a whole family of figurative forms at several levels of cognition. This volume is of great interest to scholars and professionals in the disciplines of social and cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and second language acquisition, as well as cognitive and other fields of linguistics where scholars have interests in pragmatics, metaphor, symbol, discourse, and narrative. Some knowledge of the empirical and experimental methods used in language research, as well as some familiarity with theories underlying the use, comprehension, and processing of figurative language would be helpful to readers of this book.

Language and Time

Language and Time PDF Author: Vyvyan Evans
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107043808
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Vyvyan Evans focuses on the linguistic and conceptual resources we make use of when we fix events in time.

Understanding Figurative Language

Understanding Figurative Language PDF Author: Sam Glucksberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198027126
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
This book examines how people understand utterances that are intended figuratively. Traditionally, figurative language such as metaphors and idioms has been considered derivative from more complex than ostensibly straightforward literal language. Glucksberg argues that figurative language involves the same kinds of linguistic and pragmatic operations that are used for ordinary, literal language. Glucksberg's research in this book is concerned with ordinary language: expressions that are used in daily life, including conversations about everyday matters, newspaper and magazine articles, and the media. Metaphor is the major focus of the book. Idioms, however, are also treated comprehensively, as is the theory of conceptual metaphor in the context of how people understand both conventional and novel figurative expressions. A new theory of metaphor comprehension is put forward, and evaluated with respect to competing theories in linguistics and in psychology. The central tenet of the theory is that ordinary conversational metaphors are used to create new concepts and categories. This process is spontaneous and automatic. Metaphor is special only in the sense that these categories get their names from the best examples of the things they represent, and that these categories get their names from the best examples of those categories. Thus, the literal "shark" can be a metaphor for any vicious and predatory being, from unscrupulous salespeople to a murderous character in The Threepenny Opera. Because the same term, e.g.,"shark," is used both for its literal referent and for the metaphorical category, as in "My lawyer is a shark," we call it the dual-reference theory. The theory is then extended to two other domains: idioms and conceptual metaphors. The book presents the first comprehensive account of how people use and understand metaphors in everyday life.

Models of Figurative Language

Models of Figurative Language PDF Author: Rachel Giora
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135585369
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
First published in 2001. Volume 16, Numbers 3&4. This special issue is an attempt to record the state of the art of psycholinguistics research into figurative language. There are quite a number of models addressing distinct issues and aiming to solve different problems—the mark of a maturing field. Indeed, not one theory is tailored to solve all the problems. Rather, each model, while aiming at generality, also recognizes its limitation. Despite specializing in different topics, most of the theories presented here have some things in common. For one, most of them dispense with the literal/ nonliteral divide, proposing, instead, models that are capable of handling literal as well as figurative language. Some models focus on the role primary meanings play in comprehension, others shed light on context effects, and some models seem to encompass both in terms of the accumulating effects of constraints (whether linguistic or contextual).

Figurative Language and Thought

Figurative Language and Thought PDF Author: Albert N. Katz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198026951
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them. In Figurative Language and Thought, internationally recognized experts in the field of figurative language, Albert Katz, Mark Turner, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Cristina Cacciari, provide a coherent and focused debate on the subject. The book's authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, including: What can figures of speech tell us about the structure of the conceptual system? If and how should we distinguish the literal from the nonliteral in our theories of language and thought? Are we primarily figurative thinkers and consequently figurative language users or the other way around? Why do we prefer to speak metaphorically in everyday conversation, when literal options may be available for use? Is metaphor the only vehicle through which we can understand abstract concepts? What role do cultural and social factors play in our comprehension of figurative language? These and related questions are raised and argued in an integrative look at the role of nonliteral language in cognition. This volume, a part of Counterpoints series, will be thought-provoking reading for a wide range of cognitive psychologists, linguists, and philosophers.