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
References
Athanasiadou, A.
(2017) Irony has a metonymic basis. In A. Athanasiadou, & H. Colston (Eds.), Irony in language use and communication (pp. 201–216). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Attardo, S.
(2000) Irony markers and functions: Towards a goal-oriented theory of irony and its processing. Rask, 12 , 3–20.Google Scholar
(1994) Linguistic theories of humor. New York: Mouton.Google Scholar
Barnden, J.
(2020) Uniting irony, hyperbole and metaphor in an affect-centered, pretence-based framework. In A. Athanasiadou, & H. Colston (Eds.), The diversity of irony (pp. 15–65). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Blasko, D. G., & Connine, C. M.
(1993) Effects of familiarity and aptness on metaphor processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19 (2), 295–308.Google Scholar
Brône, G., & Coulson, S.
(2010) Processing deliberate ambiguity in newspaper headlines: Double Grounding. Discourse Processes, 47 (3), 212–236. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cacciari, C.
(2014) Processing multiword idiomatic strings: many words in one? The Mental Lexicon, 9 (2), 267–293. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Colston, H. L.
(1997) “I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It”: Overstatement, understatement, and irony. Metaphor and Symbol, 12 (1), 43–58. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2017) Irony performance and perception: What underlies verbal, situational and other ironies? In A. Athanasiadou, & H. Colston (Eds.), Irony in language use and communication (pp. 19–41). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Colston, H. L., & Gibbs, R. W.
(2002) Are irony and metaphor understood differently? Metaphor and Symbol, 17 (1), 57–80. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Colston, H. L., & Keller, S. B.
(1998) You’ll never believe this: Irony and hyperbole in expressing surprise. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27 (4), 499–513. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Coulson, S., & Severens, E.
(2007) Hemispheric asymmetry and pun comprehension: When cowboys have sore calves. Brain and Language, 100 (2), 172–187. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Coulson, S., & Van Petten, C.
(2002) Conceptual integration and metaphor: An event-related potential study. Memory & Cognition, 30 , 958–968. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Doogan, S., Ghosh, A., Chen, H., & Veale, T.
(2017) Idiom savant at Semeval-2017 Task 7: Detection and interpretation of English puns. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017), 103–108. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, J. W.
(2014) Towards a dialogic syntax. Cognitive Linguistics, 25 (3), 359–410. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Duffy, S. A., Morris, R. K., & Rayner, K.
(1988) Lexical ambiguity and fixation times in reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 27 , 429–446. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fein, O., Yeari, M., & Giora, R.
(2015) On the priority of salience-based interpretations: The case of irony. Intercultural Pragmatics, 12 (1), 1–32. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ferretti, T. R., Katz, A. N., & Patterson, C.
(2006) Context-independent influence of explicit markers on proverb interpretation. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 28 , p. 2481.Google Scholar
Fodor, J.
(1983) The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Frazier, L., & Rayner, K.
(1990) Taking on semantic commitments: Processing multiple meanings vs. multiple senses. Journal of Memory and Language, 29 , 181–200. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Frisson, S., & Pickering, M. J.
(1999) The processing of metonymy: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25 , 1366–1383.Google Scholar
(2001) Obtaining a figurative interpretation of a word: Support for underspecification. Metaphor and Symbol, 16 (3–4), 149–171. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Frost, R., & Plaut, D.
(2001) The word-frequency database for printed Hebrew, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, online access: http://​word​-freq​.mscc​.huji​.ac​.il/
Gernsbacher, M. A.
(1984) Resolving 20 years of inconsistent interactions between lexical familiarity and orthography, concreteness, and polysemy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113 (2), 256–281. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, R. W.
(1994) The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
(Ed.) (2016) Mixing metaphor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giora, R.
(1985) Notes towards a theory of text coherence. Poetics Today, 6 (4), 699–715. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1997) Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics, 7 , 183–206. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1999) On the priority of salient meanings: Studies of literal and figurative language. Journal of Pragmatics, 31 , 919–929. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2003) On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. New York: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giora, R., & Becker, I.
(2019) S/he is not the most sparkling drink in the pub: Global vs. local cue – which will reign supreme? Metaphor and Symbol, 34 (3), 141–157. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giora, R., Drucker, A., & Fein, O.
(2014) Resonating with default nonsalient interpretations: A corpus-based study of negative sarcasm. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 28 , 3–18. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giora, R., Drucker, A., Fein, O., & Mendelson, I.
(2015) Default sarcastic interpretations: On the priority of nonsalient interpretations. Discourse Processes, 52 (3), 173–200. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giora, R., & Fein, O.
(1999) On understanding familiar and less-familiar figurative language. Journal of Pragmatics, 31 , 1601–1618. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giora, R., Givoni, S., & Becker, I.
(2020) How defaultness affects text production: A corpus-based study of the Defaultness Hypothesis. In A. Athanasiadou, & H. Colston (Eds.), The diversity of irony (pp. 66–77). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Giora, R., Givoni, S., & Fein, O.
(2015) Defaultness reigns: The case of sarcasm. Metaphor and Symbol, 30 (4), 290–313. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giora, R., Givoni, S., Heruti, V., & Fein, O.
(2017) The role of defaultness in affecting pleasure: The optimal innovation hypothesis revisited. Metaphor and Symbol, 32 (1), 1–18. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giora, R., Livnat, E., Fein, O., Barnea, A., Zeiman, R., & Berger, I.
(2013) Negation generates nonliteral interpretations by default. Metaphor and Symbol, 28 , 89–115. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giora, R., Meytes, D., Tamir, A., Givoni, S., Heruti, V., & Fein, O.
(2017) Defaultness shines while affirmation pales: On idioms, sarcasm, and pleasure. In A. Athanasiadou, & H. Colston (Eds.), Irony in language use and communication (pp. 219–236). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giora, R., Raphaely, M., Fein, O., & Livnat, E.
(2014) Resonating with contextually inappropriate interpretations in production: The case of irony. Cognitive Linguistics, 25 (3), 443–455. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Givoni, S.
(2011) Low-salience marking. M.A. Manuscript. Tel-Aviv University.Google Scholar
(2020) Marking multiple meanings. Doctoral Dissertation. Tel-Aviv University.Google Scholar
Givoni, S., & Giora, R.
(2018) Salience and defaultness. In F. Liedtke, & A. Tuchen (Eds.), Handbuch Pragmatik (pp. 207–213). Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Givoni, S., Bergerbest, D., & Giora, R.
in press). Marking multiple meanings – salience and context effects. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Givoni, S., Giora, R., & Bergerbest, D.
(2013) How speakers alert addressees to multiple meanings. Journal of Pragmatics, 48 (1), 29–40. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Glucksberg, S., Gildea, P., & Bookin, H. B.
(1982) On understanding nonliteral speech: Can people ignore metaphors? Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 21 (1), 85–98. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goossens, L.
(1990) Metaphtonymy: The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action. Cognitive Linguistics, 1 (3), 323–342. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grice, Paul
(1975) Logic and conversation. In P. Cole, & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, 3 (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Hills, D.
(1997) Aptness and truth in verbal metaphor. Philosophical Topics, 25 (1), 117–153. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Katz, A. N., & Ferretti, T. R.
(2001) Moment-by-moment reading of proverbs in literal and nonliteral contexts. Metaphor and Symbol, 16 (3–4), 193–221. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2003) Reading proverbs in context: The role of explicit markers. Discourse Processes, 36 (1), 19–46. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kittay, E. F.
(1987) Metaphor: Its cognitive force and linguistic structure. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Klepousniotou, E., Pike, B., Steinhauer, K., & Gracco, V.
(2012) Not all ambiguous words are created equal: an EEG investigation of homonymy and polysemy. Brain and Language, 123 , 11–21. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Livnat, Z.
(1995) Kamuvan, Kayadua’, Bekitsur: On the rhetoric force of several sentential adverbials. In O. R. Schwarzwald, & Y. Shlesinger (Eds.), Hadassah Kantor Jubilee Book: Language research papers (pp. 111–116). Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Mashal, N., & Faust, M.
(2009) Conventionalization of novel metaphors: A shift in hemispheric asymmetry. Laterality, 14 , 573–589. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mashal, N., Faust, M., & Hendler, T.
(2005) The role of the right hemisphere in processing nonsalient metaphorical meanings: Application of Principal Components Analysis to fMRI data. Neuropsychologia, 43 , 2084–2100. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mashal, N., Faust, M., Hendler, T., & Jung-Beeman, M.
(2007) An fMRI investigation of the neural correlates underlying the processing of novel metaphoric expressions. Brain & Language, 100 , 115–126. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McHugh, T., & Buchanan, L.
(2016) Pun processing from a psycholinguistic perspective: Introducing the Model of Psycholinguistics Hemispheric Incongruity Laughter (M.PHIL). Laterality: Asymmetries of body, brain and cognition, 21 (4–6): Special issue on the Legacy of M. P. Bryden. 455–483. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nerlich, B., & Chamizo Domínguez, P. J.
(2003) The use of literally. Vice or virtue? Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 1 , 193–206. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nerlich, B., & Clarke, D. D.
(2001) Ambiguities we live by: Towards a pragmatics of polysemy. Journal of Pragmatics, 33 , 1–20. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Partington, A. S.
(2009) A linguistic account of wordplay: The lexical grammar of punning. Journal of Pragmatics, 41 (9), 1794–1809. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Peleg, O., & Eviatar, Z.
(2009) Semantic asymmetries are modulated by phonological asymmetries: Evidence from the disambiguation of heterophonic versus homophonic homographs. Brain and Cognition, 70 , 154–162. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Piantadosi, S. T., Tily, H., & Gibson, E.
(2012) The communicative function of ambiguity in language. Cognition, 122 , 280–291. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Peleg, O., Giora, R., & Fein, O.
(2001) Salience and context effects: Two are better than one. Metaphor and Symbol, 16 , 173–192. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, M. J., & Frisson, S.
(2001) The semantic processing of verbs; Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 24 , 940–961.Google Scholar
Popa-Wyatt, M.
(2020) Hyperbolic figures. In A. Athanasiadou, & H. Colston (Eds.), The diversity of irony (pp. 91–106). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Powell, M. J.
(1992) Folk theories of meaning and principles of conventionality: Encoding literal attitudes via stance adverbs. In A. Lehrer, & E. F. Kittay (Eds.), Frames, fields and contrasts (pp. 333–354). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ruiz de Mendoza, F. J.
(2017) Metaphor and other cognitive operations in interaction: from basicity to complexity. In B. Hampe (Ed.) Metaphor: Embodied cognition, and discourse (pp. 138–159). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ruiz de Mendoza, F. J., & Galera-Masegosa, A.
(2011) Going beyond metaphtonymy: Metaphoric and metonymic complexes in phrasal verb interpretation. Language Value, 3 (1), 1–29. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schwint, C. A., Ferretti, T. R., & Katz, A. N.
(2006) The influence of explicit markers on slow cortical potentials during figurative language processing. 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society Proceedings, 768–773.Google Scholar
Seidenberg, M. S., Tanenhaus, M. K., Leiman, J. M., & Bienkowski, M.
(1982) Automatic access of the meaning of ambiguous words in context: Some limitations of knowledge based processing. Cognitive Psychology, 14 , 489–537. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Shaviv, T.
(2018) Legamrei – the evolution of an intensifier. Helkat Lashon, 51 , 152–174 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Sheridan, H., Reingold, E. M., & Daneman, M.
(2009) Using puns to study contextual influences on lexical ambiguity resolution: evidence from eye movements. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 16 (5), 875–881. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Siloni, T.
(1995) On participial relatives and complementizers D: A case study in Hebrew and French. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 13 , 445–487. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Swinney, D. A.
(1979) Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 18 , 645–659. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tabossi, P., Fanari, R., & Wolf, K.
(2009) Why are idioms recognized fast? Memory & Cognition, 37 (4), 529–540. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Van de Voort, M. E. C., & Vonk, W.
(1995) You don’t die immediately when you kick an empty bucket: A processing view on semantic and syntactic characteristics of idioms. In M. Everaert, E. -J. van der Linden, A. Schenk, & R. Schreuder (Eds.), Idioms: Structural and psychological perspectives (pp. 283–299). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Vicente, A.
(2018) Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words. Philosophical Studies, 175 (4), 947–968. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Williams, J. N.
(1992) Processing polysemous words in context: Evidence from interrelated meanings. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 21 , 193–218. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zewi, T.
(1999) Time in nominal sentences in the Semitic languages. Journal of Semitic Studies, 44 , 195–214. CrossrefGoogle Scholar