If first-order empathy is the ability of Self to take into account Other’s point of view, second-order empathy may be defined as the ability of Self to take into account Other’s point of view as including a view of Self. The paper argues that the possibility for the hearer to choose between a first-order empathic and a second-order empathic interpretation of speaker utterances introduces a principled and pervasive indeterminacy in speaker-hearer interactions, illustrated with examples of referential ambiguity, speech-act-related ambiguity, and sociocommunicative ambiguity. With representative speech acts, the interaction of degree of empathy and convergence/divergence of beliefs yields six interpretative configurations: assertion, mistake, agreement, disagreement, irony, deception. Thus, irony finds a systematic position within a broader calculus of intersubjective interaction.
Metaphor research has increasingly diversified, leading to extensive disagreements. A set of desiderata for any contemporary theory of metaphor are (i) to account for both communication and cognition, (ii) to explain both universal and culture-specific aspects, (iii) to achieve a balance between stable structures and contextual processes, (iv) to apply not only to different languages, but to other semiotic systems such as gesture, (v) to provide clear theoretical and operational definitions. We argue that a recent cognitive-semiotic theory, the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) is capable of fulfilling these desiderata. To evaluate predictions from the theoretical model we compare motion-emotion metaphoremes, such as my heart jumped, in six differentially related European languages – English, Swedish, Spanish, Bulgarian, Finnish and Estonian.
A prominent pragmatic effect of metaphor is meaning enhancement (Colston, 2015). Relative to comparable non-metaphorical language, metaphors can provide stronger, richer, or more poignant delivery of a proposition, idea, attitude, emotion, schema, or other meaningful construct. Metaphor constructions also alter their component parts (e.g., source and target domains). The paper measures pragmatic effect performance when metaphors are assembled in different ways, as a means of evaluating metaphor accounts. In four experiments metaphors were altered by using; (1) weak versus strong SDs, (2) mixed versus unmixed SDs, (3) single versus double instantiations of SDs, and (4) using standard metaphor versus simile constructions. Observed differences (e.g., in meaning enhancement) support the idea that metaphor understandings arise in part due to embodied simulations.
Interactionally grounded accounts of humor and irony have focused on the construction of complex layered gestalts. In most cases, these accounts provide a model for the pretense that speakers are engaged in when jointly construing ironic or humorous utterances, as well as for the affective power of such utterances. Much less studied, however, is the question how speakers interactionally monitor such sequences of joint pretense. To investigate this more systematically, I zoom in on the role of eye gaze as a mechanism for reaction monitoring by speakers and hearers. Using humorous sequences taken from a multimodal video corpus of three-party interactions, in which the gaze behavior of all participants was recorded using mobile eye-tracking devices, I describe specific gaze patterns.
We address metaphor/irony mixing, as in ironic “What a rocket!” about a very slow train. We agree that the final meaning is often better viewed as resting ironically on metaphorical meaning (the train is very fast) than metaphorically resting on ironic meaning (the train is far from being a [literal] rocket). However, we discover that matters are much messier than previously discussed. The reverse meaning dependence can be supported; it can sometimes be preferable; and there is parallel mixing, with irony and metaphor mutually independent. Also, even when hearers do metaphoric processing mostly before ironic processing, they can benefit from first of all detecting the utterance’s ironicity. This in turn suggests metaphor processing that involves contrast-based, as well as similarity-based, mappings.
Given appropriate context, indeterminacy may arise when a metonymic vehicle, i.e. the source, can be simultaneously linked to more than one metonymic target. We claim that this situation, akin to the phenomenon of metalepsis or transgression in narratology, is not rare, but quite usual, and even regular in certain contexts. This may lead to an increase of a second-order type of anisomorphy, but ultimately leaves space for dynamic meaning construal and optimizes texts coherence. In order to accommodate metalepsis, we argue for an approach to metonymy not based on mappings but on the activation of the source conceptual cluster opening a mental space dynamically expanded or reduced so as to fit the conceptual frame provided by the co(n)text of use.
This chapter treats the notion of ironic echo as subsidiary to the broader notion of epistemic scenario, which applies to both verbal and situational irony. In verbal irony, the existence of an epistemic scenario takes the shape of a pretended agreement with someone’s beliefs, which can be materialized in agreement expressions of various kinds including echoic mentions. In situational irony, the epistemic scenario is built on a generally reliable assumption about a state of affairs. Finally, situational irony can be embedded within a communicative context, an observation which allows for a classification of ironic types that overrides the traditional verbal irony-situational irony dichotomy. The resulting account provides a single unified framework for the study of irony.
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.
Polysemy is a basic principle of the lexis of English, but the full range of senses of a lexeme and the ways in which these interact are not often considered in accounts of metaphor and metonymy. This paper presents a case study of the lexeme dull, which develops multiple meanings that do not appear to represent the kind of straightforward concrete > abstract metaphorical mapping that might be assumed. Rather, the complex semantic history of the word reveals gradual shifts in meaning involving metonymy, and change motivated by analogy. I argue that ignoring word histories risks synchronic ‘misreading’ of the relationship between their senses (Geeraerts, 2015), and that polysemy should be acknowledged more prominently in standard accounts.
Figurative language provides a testing bed for language processing in general, since it requires speakers to utilize a sophisticated range of linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive skills to derive an appropriate interpretation. The toolkit of psycholinguistics, where precise measurements of behavioural responses help to build a model of underlying cognitive processes, can enrich our understanding of this complex topic. Two techniques that have been fruitfully applied to the study of figurative language are cross-modal priming and eye-tracking. Drawing on a range of example studies from the literature, this chapter will demonstrate how figurative language research can benefit from the application of psycholinguistic techniques. It concludes with a consideration of how experimental results can be interpreted against existing theories and models.
The overall aim of this chapter is to contribute to the debate around the controversy of what might be approached as a conceptual or a local/situated metaphor, by elaborating on a distinction between two theoretical levels. On the one hand, at the level of the conceptual system, we have high-order, off-line representations, such as conceptual metaphors, and, on the other, at the level of use, there are episodic, often deliberate, on-line conceptualizations, such as situated metaphors. Within a cognitive-discursive perspective, it is argued that these two levels are articulated, in a coherent and systematic way, in figurative language in use. An analysis of an extended situated metaphor explored in an argumentative text illustrates the way this articulation may be woven in discourse.
Lexical items with a ludic potential have not been systematically studied up to now. The aim of this paper is thus to explore sources of humor in the French and Italian lexicon and to investigate to what extent the notion of incongruity can explain the humorous effects and ludic usage of lexical items. Incongruity will be reinterpreted from a usage-based perspective, stressing the interactional dimension of communication (see also Kotthoff, 1998; Onysko, 2016), which defines the relative inappropriateness and pragmatic markedness of the items. In addition, the semantic distance and (in)compatibility of the meanings as well as the semiotic nature of the relevant reference entities will be taken into account, and a typology of relevant subtypes of incongruity will be proposed.
This chapter investigates the impact of conceptual metaphor on the cultural variation of emotions in European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP/BP). Adopting a usage-based, sociocognitive view of language and applying a corpus-based and profile-based methodology, this study combines a multifactorial usage-feature and metaphorical profile analysis of 1,100 examples of anger and pride with their subsequent multivariate statistics modeling. BP seems more connected with complaining anger and the metaphorically unrestrained and perceptible manifestation of anger. Also, BP is closer to self-centered pride and the metaphorically visible manifestation of pride. In contrast, EP seems more akin to violent and interpersonal anger and the metaphorically profiled somatization of anger. Also, EP is more associated with other-directed pride and the personification of pride as an honored person. These statistically significant associations are consistent with the more individualistic, indulgent, and emotionally expressive culture of Brazil and the more collectivistic and restrained culture of Portugal.
If first-order empathy is the ability of Self to take into account Other’s point of view, second-order empathy may be defined as the ability of Self to take into account Other’s point of view as including a view of Self. The paper argues that the possibility for the hearer to choose between a first-order empathic and a second-order empathic interpretation of speaker utterances introduces a principled and pervasive indeterminacy in speaker-hearer interactions, illustrated with examples of referential ambiguity, speech-act-related ambiguity, and sociocommunicative ambiguity. With representative speech acts, the interaction of degree of empathy and convergence/divergence of beliefs yields six interpretative configurations: assertion, mistake, agreement, disagreement, irony, deception. Thus, irony finds a systematic position within a broader calculus of intersubjective interaction.
Metaphor research has increasingly diversified, leading to extensive disagreements. A set of desiderata for any contemporary theory of metaphor are (i) to account for both communication and cognition, (ii) to explain both universal and culture-specific aspects, (iii) to achieve a balance between stable structures and contextual processes, (iv) to apply not only to different languages, but to other semiotic systems such as gesture, (v) to provide clear theoretical and operational definitions. We argue that a recent cognitive-semiotic theory, the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) is capable of fulfilling these desiderata. To evaluate predictions from the theoretical model we compare motion-emotion metaphoremes, such as my heart jumped, in six differentially related European languages – English, Swedish, Spanish, Bulgarian, Finnish and Estonian.
A prominent pragmatic effect of metaphor is meaning enhancement (Colston, 2015). Relative to comparable non-metaphorical language, metaphors can provide stronger, richer, or more poignant delivery of a proposition, idea, attitude, emotion, schema, or other meaningful construct. Metaphor constructions also alter their component parts (e.g., source and target domains). The paper measures pragmatic effect performance when metaphors are assembled in different ways, as a means of evaluating metaphor accounts. In four experiments metaphors were altered by using; (1) weak versus strong SDs, (2) mixed versus unmixed SDs, (3) single versus double instantiations of SDs, and (4) using standard metaphor versus simile constructions. Observed differences (e.g., in meaning enhancement) support the idea that metaphor understandings arise in part due to embodied simulations.
Interactionally grounded accounts of humor and irony have focused on the construction of complex layered gestalts. In most cases, these accounts provide a model for the pretense that speakers are engaged in when jointly construing ironic or humorous utterances, as well as for the affective power of such utterances. Much less studied, however, is the question how speakers interactionally monitor such sequences of joint pretense. To investigate this more systematically, I zoom in on the role of eye gaze as a mechanism for reaction monitoring by speakers and hearers. Using humorous sequences taken from a multimodal video corpus of three-party interactions, in which the gaze behavior of all participants was recorded using mobile eye-tracking devices, I describe specific gaze patterns.
We address metaphor/irony mixing, as in ironic “What a rocket!” about a very slow train. We agree that the final meaning is often better viewed as resting ironically on metaphorical meaning (the train is very fast) than metaphorically resting on ironic meaning (the train is far from being a [literal] rocket). However, we discover that matters are much messier than previously discussed. The reverse meaning dependence can be supported; it can sometimes be preferable; and there is parallel mixing, with irony and metaphor mutually independent. Also, even when hearers do metaphoric processing mostly before ironic processing, they can benefit from first of all detecting the utterance’s ironicity. This in turn suggests metaphor processing that involves contrast-based, as well as similarity-based, mappings.
Given appropriate context, indeterminacy may arise when a metonymic vehicle, i.e. the source, can be simultaneously linked to more than one metonymic target. We claim that this situation, akin to the phenomenon of metalepsis or transgression in narratology, is not rare, but quite usual, and even regular in certain contexts. This may lead to an increase of a second-order type of anisomorphy, but ultimately leaves space for dynamic meaning construal and optimizes texts coherence. In order to accommodate metalepsis, we argue for an approach to metonymy not based on mappings but on the activation of the source conceptual cluster opening a mental space dynamically expanded or reduced so as to fit the conceptual frame provided by the co(n)text of use.
This chapter treats the notion of ironic echo as subsidiary to the broader notion of epistemic scenario, which applies to both verbal and situational irony. In verbal irony, the existence of an epistemic scenario takes the shape of a pretended agreement with someone’s beliefs, which can be materialized in agreement expressions of various kinds including echoic mentions. In situational irony, the epistemic scenario is built on a generally reliable assumption about a state of affairs. Finally, situational irony can be embedded within a communicative context, an observation which allows for a classification of ironic types that overrides the traditional verbal irony-situational irony dichotomy. The resulting account provides a single unified framework for the study of irony.
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.
Polysemy is a basic principle of the lexis of English, but the full range of senses of a lexeme and the ways in which these interact are not often considered in accounts of metaphor and metonymy. This paper presents a case study of the lexeme dull, which develops multiple meanings that do not appear to represent the kind of straightforward concrete > abstract metaphorical mapping that might be assumed. Rather, the complex semantic history of the word reveals gradual shifts in meaning involving metonymy, and change motivated by analogy. I argue that ignoring word histories risks synchronic ‘misreading’ of the relationship between their senses (Geeraerts, 2015), and that polysemy should be acknowledged more prominently in standard accounts.
Figurative language provides a testing bed for language processing in general, since it requires speakers to utilize a sophisticated range of linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive skills to derive an appropriate interpretation. The toolkit of psycholinguistics, where precise measurements of behavioural responses help to build a model of underlying cognitive processes, can enrich our understanding of this complex topic. Two techniques that have been fruitfully applied to the study of figurative language are cross-modal priming and eye-tracking. Drawing on a range of example studies from the literature, this chapter will demonstrate how figurative language research can benefit from the application of psycholinguistic techniques. It concludes with a consideration of how experimental results can be interpreted against existing theories and models.
The overall aim of this chapter is to contribute to the debate around the controversy of what might be approached as a conceptual or a local/situated metaphor, by elaborating on a distinction between two theoretical levels. On the one hand, at the level of the conceptual system, we have high-order, off-line representations, such as conceptual metaphors, and, on the other, at the level of use, there are episodic, often deliberate, on-line conceptualizations, such as situated metaphors. Within a cognitive-discursive perspective, it is argued that these two levels are articulated, in a coherent and systematic way, in figurative language in use. An analysis of an extended situated metaphor explored in an argumentative text illustrates the way this articulation may be woven in discourse.
Lexical items with a ludic potential have not been systematically studied up to now. The aim of this paper is thus to explore sources of humor in the French and Italian lexicon and to investigate to what extent the notion of incongruity can explain the humorous effects and ludic usage of lexical items. Incongruity will be reinterpreted from a usage-based perspective, stressing the interactional dimension of communication (see also Kotthoff, 1998; Onysko, 2016), which defines the relative inappropriateness and pragmatic markedness of the items. In addition, the semantic distance and (in)compatibility of the meanings as well as the semiotic nature of the relevant reference entities will be taken into account, and a typology of relevant subtypes of incongruity will be proposed.
This chapter investigates the impact of conceptual metaphor on the cultural variation of emotions in European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP/BP). Adopting a usage-based, sociocognitive view of language and applying a corpus-based and profile-based methodology, this study combines a multifactorial usage-feature and metaphorical profile analysis of 1,100 examples of anger and pride with their subsequent multivariate statistics modeling. BP seems more connected with complaining anger and the metaphorically unrestrained and perceptible manifestation of anger. Also, BP is closer to self-centered pride and the metaphorically visible manifestation of pride. In contrast, EP seems more akin to violent and interpersonal anger and the metaphorically profiled somatization of anger. Also, EP is more associated with other-directed pride and the personification of pride as an honored person. These statistically significant associations are consistent with the more individualistic, indulgent, and emotionally expressive culture of Brazil and the more collectivistic and restrained culture of Portugal.