Chapter published in:
Producing Figurative Expression: Theoretical, experimental and practical perspectives
Edited by John Barnden and Andrew Gargett
[Figurative Thought and Language 10] 2020
► pp. 211–236

How defaultness shapes our language production

A usage-based study of discoursal resonance with default interpretations of metaphor and sarcasm

| Tel Aviv University
The paper focuses on discourse production. It shows that language production unfolds via resonating (Du Bois, 2014) with default interpretations. Default interpretations are defined as automatic responses. However, for an automatic response to be considered a default, it has to be (i) novel; (ii) free of semantic an omaly (Beardsley, 1958) and internal incongruity (Partington, 2011); and (iii) free of contextual information, intonation, discourse markers, etc. Results show that constructions, shown to be interpreted sarcastically or metaphorically when in isolation, were processed faster than nondefault counterparts when in discourse. As a result, corpus-based studies, displaying default interpretations, show that speakers’ discourse is unfolding via utterances’ default rather than nondefault interpretations. This applies here to Hebrew but also to English, German, and Russian.
Keywords: discourse production, default interpretations, nondefault interpretations, processing, sarcasm, metaphor, literalness, negative, affirmative, corpus-based studies
Published online: 17 December 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.10.08gio
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