Creativity and Convention

The pragmatics of everyday figurative speech

Rosa E. Vega Moreno | University College, London

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027253996 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027292131 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

This book offers a pragmatic account of the interpretation of everyday metaphorical and idiomatic expressions. Using the framework of Relevance Theory, it reanalyses the results of recent experimental research on figurative utterances and provides a novel account of the interplay of creativity and convention in figurative interpretation, showing how features ‘emerge’ during metaphor comprehension and how literal meaning contributes to idiom comprehension. The central claim is that the mind is rather selective when processing information, and that in the pragmatic interpretation of both literal and figurative utterances, this selectivity often results in the creation of new (‘ad hoc’) concepts or the standardization of pragmatic routines. With this approach, the comprehension of metaphors and idioms requires no special pragmatic principles or procedures not required for the interpretation of ordinary literal utterances, but follows from an automatic tendency towards selective processing which is itself a by-product of Sperber and Wilson’s Cognitive Principle of Relevance.

[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 156] 2007. xii, 249 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 1 July 2008

https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.156

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | p. XI

Introduction | p. 1

Human creative cognition and selective processing

1. Introduction | p. 5

2. The selective mind | p. 7

2.1 Selective processing
2.2 Selectivity and ad hoc categories

3. Human memory and information processing | p. 12

3.1 The Encoding Specificity Principle
3.2 Memory processes and lexical fl exibility

4. Concept construction and selective processing | p. 16

4.1 Selective processing and the instability of graded structure
4.2 Constrains on concept instability

5. The Depth of Processing Hypothesis | p. 22

5.1 Standard ideas and research
5.2 Beyond the Depth of Processing Hypothesis

6. Conclusion | p. 28

Relevance Theory: Communication and cognition

1. Introduction | p. 29

2. Basic notions of relevance-theoretical pragmatics | p. 30

2.1 The Cognitive Principle of Relevance and the definition of relevance
2.2 The Communicative Principle and the comprehension procedure

3. Relevance Theory and utterance interpretation | p. 35

4. Accessibility of contextual assumptions | p. 40

5. Lexical pragmatics | p. 44

6. Conclusion | p. 52

Metaphor, interaction and property attribution

1. Introduction | p. 53

2. Traditional views on metaphor | p. 54

3. A challenge to the Literal Priority Claim | p. 56

4. From property matching to property attribution | p. 61

5. The Class-Inclusion theory: Attribution, interaction and categorisation | p. 65

5.1 Metaphor and ad hoc categories
5.2 Interaction in interpretation
5.3 Problems with the Class Inclusion View

6. The emergence problem | p. 75

6.1 Experimental work on emergence
6.2 Emergence and the Class-Inclusion Theory
6.3 Emergence and Blending Theory

7. The transformation problem | p. 81

8. Conclusion: Towards a cognitively-adequate pragmatic approach | p. 84

Relevance Theory and metaphor interpretation | p. 87

1. Introduction | p. 87

2. Relevance, literalness and metaphor interpretation | p. 87

2.1 Lexical pragmatics and loose use

3. Pragmatic adjustment and metaphor interpretation | p. 96

3.1 Relevance Theory and emergence
3.2 Relevance Theory and the transformation problem
3.3 The bulldozer case

4. Creative and standardised loose uses | p. 112

4.1 Inferential routes and pragmatic routines

5. Conclusion | p. 119

Relevance Theory and cognitive approaches to metaphor | p. 121

1. Introduction | p. 121

2. Relevance Theory and standard assumptions on metaphor research | p. 121

3. Relevance Theory and the Class-inclusion theory | p. 124

3.1 Experimental evidence

4. Conceptual metaphor theory | p. 131

4.1 Conceptual Metaphor theory and Relevance Theory

5. Conclusion | p. 141

Analysability in idiom comprehension | p. 143

1. Introduction | p. 143

2. Idioms: Arbitrariness or compositionality? | p. 143

3. Idioms as (partly) analysable phrases | p. 148

4. Psycholinguistic research on the analysability of idioms | p. 153

4.1 The role of analysability in idiom use and interpretation
4.2 Comments on experimental research

5. The nature of compositionality | p. 163

5.1 Composition and decomposition
5.2 Analysability as transparency
5.3 Decomposition and transparency

6. Analysability and the processing and representation of idioms | p. 170

6.1 The activation of idiomatic meaning
6.1.1 The Configuration Hypothesis
6.2 Activation and integration in processing

7. Conclusion | p. 175

Idioms, transparency and pragmatic inference | p. 177

1. Introduction | p. 177

2. Idioms, metaphors and unfamiliar words | p. 178

3. Making sense of idioms | p. 185

3.1 Synchronic rationale
3.2 The contribution of word meaning
3.3 Conclusions on acquisition

4. Familiar Idioms: Representation and processing | p. 196

4.1 Activation and interpretation

5. Pragmatic adjustment | p. 203

5.1 Word meaning and idiom meaning

6. Interpreting idiom variants | p. 207

7. Some conclusions on idiom processing and idiom variants | p. 213

8. Conclusion | p. 215

Creativity and convention beyond figurative speech | p. 217

1. Introduction | p. 217

2. Creativity and convention in language | p. 217

3. The psychology of routines | p. 221

3.1 Controlled and automatic processing
3.2 Automaticity and expertise
3.3 Stages in expertise development and degrees of automaticity

4. Conclusion | p. 227

Conclusion | p. 229

Index | p. 245

“By bringing together ideas from relevance-theoretic pragmatics and empirical results from a wide range of psycholinguistic experiments, this study of metaphor and idiom achieves a unique and illuminating synthesis. Of particular interest is a new and original explanation of how so-called 'emergent properties' can be recovered in the process of on-line inferential comprehension. This book is a significant contribution to work on metaphor, creative cognition more generally, and cognitive pragmatics.”

Robyn Carston, University College London

“This book is a major step forward in our understanding of the interplay between creativity and convention in utterance interpretation, and in the interpretation of metaphor and idiom in particular. Using the pragmatic framework of relevance theory, and drawing on a wide range of experimental results from psycholinguistics, it is the first serious and sustained attempt to show that metaphor and idiom do not require special interpretive mechanisms, but are understood in the same way as ordinary, literal utterances. It is an original and important contribution to the field, and deserves to be very widely read.”

Deidre Wilson, University College London

“ Creativity and Convention is a valuable book for scholars interested in pragmatic processes of understanding figurative speech and sharing cognitive pragmatic presumptions. [...] Vega Moreno's ambitious book is an inspiring and absorbing reading.”

Jörg Kost, University of Cologne, Germany, on Linguist List 20.2342

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Subjects

Linguistics

Cognition and language

Discourse studies

Pragmatics

Main BIC Subject

CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General

ONIX Metadata

ONIX 2.1

ONIX 3.0

U.S. Library of Congress Control Number: 2007003850 | Marc record