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Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond
Edited by Herbert L. Colston, Teenie Matlock and Gerard J. Steen
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 9] 2022
► pp. 341–356

Language happens

| University of California

This chapter provides a brief tour through the history of psycholinguistics with a running thread that follows the work of Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and an evolution toward more ecologically valid approaches and interactive embodied perspectives on how language works. Rather than treating language as though it were a static object with parts that invite removing and analyzing, contemporary psycholinguists and cognitive scientists are treating language more like an event that happens over time. This shift in perspective requires different types of theory formation, different types of experimental methods and different types of statistical analyses. As this paradigm shift progresses, more of the field may begin to see language not as a set of rules that a human brain contains inside itself but instead as an activity that people engage in together. The Gibbsian research program has played an important role in this evolution of the field.

Keywords: psycholinguistics, word recognition, sentence Processing, figurative language, embodied cognition, conversation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • A solitary language processor is not what processes language
  • A solitary brain is not what processes language
  • A solitary person is not what processes language
  • A community of people is what processes language
  • References
Published online: 9 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.9.18spi
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