Chapter published in:
Figurative Language – Intersubjectivity and Usage
Edited by Augusto Soares da Silva
[Figurative Thought and Language 11] 2021
► pp. 241–284

On figurative ambiguity, marking, and low-salience meanings

| Tel-Aviv University
| The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo
| Tel-Aviv University
This paper discusses the phenomenon of marked ambiguation, when more than one meaning of an ambiguity is simultaneously applicable, and outlines an account for such marking within the Low-Salience Marking Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, ambiguity markers (e.g., double entendre, in the full sense of the word) boost meanings low on salience (Givoni, 2011; Givoni, Giora, and Bergerbest, 2013). Low-salience meanings are meanings less frequent, less familiar, less prototypical, and less conventional (Giora, 1997, 2003). Results from two experiments conducted in Hebrew support the hypothesis. They show that marking figurative polysemy results in higher preference and faster response times for less-salient meanings, challenging modular (Fodor, 1983), literal-first (Grice, 1975), and underspecification (Frisson and Pickering, 2001) accounts of lexical access.
Keywords: marking, figurativity, polysemy, salience, low-salience, The Low-Salience Marking Hypothesis, ambiguity processing, lexical access
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction – disambiguation vs. ambiguation
  • 2.The phenomenon of marking multiple meanings
    • 2.1Why ambiguation? Why marking?
    • 2.2Is ambiguation the same as punning?
    • 2.3Does ambiguation always involve a figurative meaning and a literal meaning?
  • 3.Ambiguity processing models and their predictions for marked ambiguity
    • 3.1Which meanings benefit from marking?
    • 3.2The Low-Salience Marking Hypothesis
      • 3.2.1Predictions
      • 3.2.2Previous findings
  • 4.Experiments
    • 4.1Experiment 1 – an offline study
      • Aim
      • Participants
      • Materials
      • Sentences
      • Probe-words
      • Markers
        • Pretest 1.Meaning relatedness
        • Pretest 2.Meaning prevalence
        • Pretest 3.Online salience
      • Probe pretests summary
        • Pretest 4.Marking coherence
      • Procedure
      • Results
      • Discussion
    • 4.2Experiment 2 – an online study
      • Aim
      • Participants
      • Materials
      • Procedure
      • Results
      • Discussion
  • 5.General discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 May 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.11.08giv
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