Figurative Language Comprehension

Social and Cultural Influences

Herbert L. Colston, Albert N. Katz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135625818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1

On Sociocultural and Nonliteral: A Synopsis and a Prophesy

Herbert L. Colston

University of Wisconsin–Parkside

The past several decades of psychological and linguistic empirical research and theorizing on nonliteral language has branched into a few key directions. Much of this work has focused and continues to focus on the comprehension of forms of figurative, indirect, and other kinds of nonliteral language. Some of this work concerns specific, step-by-step, online processing; other work is directed at the products of the comprehension and interpretation processes. A related line of work has attended to the sorts of pragmatic accomplishments that these kinds of language perform for interlocutors. This work seeks explanations of what is done by forms of nonliteral language and how these achievements are brought about. A growing interest in the production of nonliteral language is also emerging, as is a concern for authenticity. And the theoretical efforts to account for the accumulating empirical findings continue in light of these developments as well as related phenomena like situational irony.

One implicit idea emerging in much of this work is that of a growing appreciation of the importance of social and cultural influences to the comprehension, processing, use, pragmatic accomplishments, and so on of nonliteral language forms. Scholars have increasingly focused on variables such as gender, status, cultural background, age, and others in their observations, experiments, examples, and so on used to gain an understanding of nonliteral language cognition.

This book is offered as a first attempt to summarize and synthesize this appreciation of sociocultural influences. The chapters were prepared by a wide variety of talented scholars of nonliteral language, with a diversity of backgrounds in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistics, social psychology, and other areas. Thus, there is no universal theoretical or methodological underpinning or agenda to this work. Rather, the chapters reflect the diversity of approaches and mechanisms in the study of nonliteral language. But the fact that these different perspectives have all unearthed the need to pay much greater attention to social and cultural influences underscores the importance of these influences.

A number of themes can be distilled from the chapters presented here. These range from (a) the kinds of mechanisms discussed for nonliteral language comprehension to (b) the variety of types of nonliteral language treated, (c) the twin ideas of what is a social and what is a cultural variable, and (d) what the actual influences in interlocutors might be. A number of theoretical backgrounds are also used in the chapters. These emerging themes and theories served to help organize the structure of the book. In this chapter I discuss each briefly and follow with a short discussion of the likely direction research on nonliteral language cognition should take given this heightened awareness of sociocultural influences. First, however, a very brief comment on the organization of the book is in order.

Categorizing the chapters into coherent, separable sections according to their content proved to be a very difficult task. Organization schemes based on the kind of theoretical approach, type of nonliteral language, particular form of sociocultural influence, and so on were not viable because many of the chapters discuss multiple approaches, several nonliteral forms, various influences, and so forth. Instead, divisions based on the primary topic or strength of the chapters were created. The resulting four parts are Sociocultural Knowledge Influences, Sociocultural Phenomenological Influences, Sociocultural Processing Influences, and New Sociocultural Influences. Please note, however, that the content of a given chapter may supercede the section in which it was placed.

MECHANISMS IN NONLITERAL LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION: COMMON GROUND, SUPPRESSION, NEGATION, SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES, CONTRAST, SCHEMAS, AND PRIMING

The role of common ground in the processing and comprehension of the meaning of instances of nonliteral language was taken up in two of the chapters—those by Gerrig and Horton and by Barr and Keysar. In particular, Gerrig and Horton argue that people necessarily interpret contextual expressions against both communal and personal sources of common ground. An alternative view that egocentrism is more prevalent in everyday language than mutual knowledge would allow is offered by Barr and Keysar. This chapter makes a case that, contrary to the traditional view in pragmatics, conventions in language use can emerge without appeal to mutual knowledge between interlocutors. Rather, conventions can emerge, “as by-products of dyadic-level mechanisms of coordination” (Barr & Keysar, chap. 2, this book).

This is a fascinating development in that such contrary claims with evidence can be provided. My suspicion is that both claims are in a sense true, in that common ground is used, on occasion necessarily so, for important aspects of comprehension of many language forms. But there may also exist parallel lower level interaction mechanisms, as described by Barr and Keysar, as well as some others (e.g., mimicry, response in kind, script adherence, priming, chaining, attitude display, acting, and mere continuance) that are also influential. Future work might attempt to substantiate the separation of these mechanisms and address related questions such as how the mechanisms work individually and interactively, their possible interdependence, when are each used, and so on.

Another emerging mechanism involved in nonliteral language comprehension is that of negation. Giora, Balaban, Fein, and Alkabets’ chapter bolsters an ongoing attack on the notion that negation markers (e.g., not) suppress their target concepts. Although applicable much more broadly to other language forms, this attack on suppression, or more specifically on obligatory suppression, plays a key role in some forms of indirect language (e.g., litotes). This chapter presents experimental evidence that meanings suppressed via negation markers are retained and influence later processing.

Gibbs and Izett’s chapter highlights a variety of cognitive and, in particular, social psychological mechanisms of persuasion, including contrast, reciprocity, cognitive dissonance, analogical reasoning, and others, in its review of the persuasive ability of verbal irony. This chapter poignantly demonstrates the great need for more cross talk between social psychologists who study the mechanisms for how people influence one another, through language and other means, and psycholinguists and linguists who study the pragmatic accomplishments of forms of language.

Last, Blumentritt and Heredia’s chapter discusses the mechanisms of schema processing in the form of stereotypes, as well as priming, and how they can influence the comprehension of forms of metonymy and metaphor. This chapter is of particular value in its coupling of standard mechanisms of cognitive functioning–language processing with a timely, important, and heretofore generally ignored sociocultural variable—stereotypes.

A few other mechanisms are also discussed, including conversational implicature and constraint satisfaction, but these are treated in the following sections, along with the theoretical approaches.

TYPES OF NONLITERAL LANGUAGE

The second theme of this book is that it brings together work that addresses the commonly studied forms of nonliteral language with work on relatively understudied nonliteral forms. The chapters report studies on metaphor and verbal irony, as well as on metonymy, proverbs, asyndeton, contextual expressions, idioms, scalar statements, “What is X doing Y” constructions (WXDYs), conventional indirect requests, analogies, litotes, and metaphorical signs.

One goal of the book was to assess whether any points of discussion might emerge in the treatments of these diverse nonliteral forms, in terms of the theoretical approach, mechanistic requirements, and so on. At least three of these points are considered.

The first is the degree to which language forms depend on contexts of different sorts to enable appropriate comprehension. The chapters by Curcó, Gerrig and Horton, Holtgraves, and Barr and Keysar deal with this issue explicitly, and indeed all of the chapters deal with it implicitly in their recognition of the importance of the social and cultural influences, which are certainly part of the contextual component of comprehension.

What might be emergent from these discussions, however, is the varying degree of dependence on different kinds of contexts in the comprehension of the different types of nonliteral language, particularly those having to do with these sociocultural variables. Beyond the related issues of idiomaticity, conventionalization, fixed expressions, and the like, which have received extended treatment in many other venues, the extent of nonliteral forms treated here and their relative dependence on social and cultural variables for comprehension might shed new light on the role of context. Consider that, clearly, all forms of language—nonliteral and others—require some degree of context for appropriate comprehension. But there is an arguably greater role played by context in many instances of nonliteral language comprehension, because of the less direct correspondence between the utterance meaning and the intended meaning. Comprehension thus must rely on something else.

So, comprehension of nonliteral forms relies more on context. But, and this point is less often made, such comprehension also relies more on sociocultural pragmatic reasoning. Moreover, this shift toward contextual and sociocultural sources of information may vary depending on the kind of nonliteral form being comprehended. Arguably, verbal irony, metaphors, and metonymies based on stereotypes, and possibly other forms, might rely more on sociocultural information than other aspects of context. Asyndeton, contextual expressions, idioms, analogies, litotes, and scalar statements, conversely, might rely more on other aspects of context than on sociocultural information. Granted, this observation is speculative at this point, but it certainly behooves us to look more at different sources of context, including sociocultural information, and how different nonliteral forms would rely on these sources to varying degrees, and then perhaps attempt to determine why this is the case. This observation has been made by other scholars concerning the relative dependence of verbal irony versus metaphor (Colston & Gibbs, 2002), but it might ought be expanded to include the entire continuum of nonliteral forms.

The second emergent point in consideration of the many nonliteral forms treated here concerns an argument I made elsewhere about whether nonliteral language comprehension should be approached with an inclusive or a piecemeal theoretical goal (Colston, 2002). The former approach is demonstrated powerfully in Holtgraves’ chapter, wherein a classification of a number of nonliteral language forms according to different kinds of implicatures is presented. Several of the other chapters might be seen as espousing the more fragmented approach, whereby the mechanisms they cover might apply only to one nonliteral form or family (e.g., Gibbs and Izett’s contrast and verbal irony, Giora’s suppression and litotes, and Blumentritt and Heredia’s schema activation and metonymy). Whether Holtgraves’ approach can account for all kinds of nonliteral language and whether it can provide a detailed enough explanation to account for all the rich pragmatic accomplishments of the different forms (whether it should be required to explain the latter, however, is an open question) remains to be seen. Nevertheless, this classification is just the sort of work that is needed to evaluate whether we can build an explanation of language comprehension in general, based on such mechanistic or theoretical tenets, or whether different families of nonliteral (and literal) forms will each require their own set of explanations.

The last point of discussion to emerge in the chapters’ treatments of many nonliteral forms is that of possible mixtures of mechanisms and processes, some of them contradictory and others complementary or parallel (see Gibbs & Colston, 2002, for a discussion of these possible mixtures for ironic communication), that might underlie nonliteral language use and comprehension. One example is the reliance on common ground versus more dyadic-level mechanisms of coordination already discussed for the comprehension of contextual expressions and referential precedents in the chapters by Gerrig and Horton and by Barr and Keysar, respectively. A second example might be the varying degree to which suppression of meaning occurs in nonliteral language comprehension. Giora notes that suppression, although not obligatory, does nevertheless occasionally occur. There may thus be different mechanisms at play, one in which suppression occurs and one in which it does to a lesser degree. A third example might be the conflict between contrast effect mechanisms and tinge mechanisms in verbal irony comprehension (see Colston, 1997, for a review of this debate). The former is discussed in Gibbs and Izett’s chapter, the latter is treated in Giora’s chapter (although not for verbal irony). Another example might be the mix of processes that underlie the intergroup conflict phenomenon discussed in Colston’s chapter. Here, a combination of language comprehension processes, social tension and cognitive load, and social psychological principles were shown to combine to produce and maintain communication difficulties between different sociocultural groups.

The bottom line here is that nonliteral language use and comprehension is a very complicated matter. The rich nuance of clever meaning exchange and pragmatic accomplishment achieved by nonliteral language motivates its existence, but it is also made possible only by the interplay and, on occasion, conflict between an array of complex cognitive, linguistic, social, developmental, and other processes. It may not, therefore, be the case that a particular processing mechanism (e.g., activation of a conceptual metaphorical mapping, creation of a blended space, contrast between context and utterance meaning, inflated perception of an expectation–reality discrepancy, and a host of others) plays a role in each and every usage and comprehension of a particular nonliteral form. Granted, there may be general tendencies, but the true complexity of nonliteral forms and, in particular, the often found clever blends of nonliteral forms (e.g., an echoic, ironic, hyperbolic metaphor delivered laterally) might make straightforward deterministic explanations of nonliteral language incapable of accounting for the entire phenomenon.

WHAT IS “SOCIAL” AND “CULTURAL”?

The third theme that arose from the chapters concerns different ideas about what it means for something to be a social or a cultural influence or variable. Perhaps this discussion is best begun with a listing and description of the variety of sociocultural variables that the chapters cover. Gender is the most prevalent sociocultural variable discussed in the chapters. Colston, Katz, Link and Kreuz, and Pexman all offer extensive treatments of the role that gender plays in nonliteral language use, comprehension, and processing in terms of the gender of both speakers and listeners. The social relationship between interlocutors (e.g., close friends vs. strangers) is taken up in the chapters by Gerrig and Horton, Gibbs and Izett, Katz, and Pexman. Social role (e.g., high vs. low status or power) is treated in the chapters by Katz and Holtsgraves. Occupation (e.g., high irony [comedian] vs. low irony [nun]) is discussed by Katz, Pexman, and Holtgraves. Geographic origin is included in the discussion of proverb comprehension by Curcó, as was religious back-ground—a very clever insight and possibly a sociocultural variable that has not been considered previously in discussions of nonliteral language use and comprehension. Political background is treated by both Giora et al. and Blumentrit and Heredia. These same chapters also discuss speakers’ and listeners’ ethnicity. Ethnicity and other kinds of cultural background—including the idea that the mere degree of cooperativeness in communication or degree of indirectness prevalence may be a cultural difference—are reviewed by Holtgraves. Personality traits are discussed in Pexman’s chapter, and the medium of language (e.g., spoken vs. signed)—also a very important sociocultural variable that has received relatively little past attention—is discussed extensively by Marschark.

As already alluded, these variables have also been treated in a variety of ways. Occasionally, a sociocultural variable is treated as a predictor of the likelihood of using a particular kind of nonliteral language (e.g., men use sarcasm more than women). Other times it is considered a predictor of how a nonliteral utterance will be comprehended (e.g., a person from outside a given culture will be less likely to interpret correctly the nonliteral meaning of a proverb). Still other times they are treated as more global predictors of use or comprehension extent, quality, and so on (e.g., cultures with more indirectness will use and comprehend nonliteral language more often than cultures with less indirectness). In some cases a sociocultural variable is also considered along with another expressive phenomenon (e.g., men use more nonliteral language for negative vs. positive emotional expressions).

Other chapters discuss the role that sociocultural variables play at different levels of nonliteral language cognition. Katz’s chapter in particular provides a detailed discussion of both on-and offline effects of sociocultural variables. Gibbs and Izett’s chapter talks about the variety of ways that social influence principles are at play in the use or comprehension of verbal irony, both in terms of online language processing and in broad effects of irony as an influencer (e.g., as an effective tool in advertising campaigns). Curcó’s chapter discusses the influence of degree of experience with a given language as well as degree of acculturation in comprehension of native language proverbs—and concomitant with this, the variety of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 On Sociocultural and Nonliteral: A Synopsis and a Prophesy
• Part I Sociocultural Knowledge Influences
• Part II Sociocultural Phenomenological Influences
• Part III Sociocultural Processing Influences
• Part IV New Sociocultural Influences
• Author Index
• Subject Index