Raymond W. Gibbs

Embodiment and cognitive science

Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Bodies and persons 3. Perception and action 4. Concepts 5. Imagery, memory, and reasoning 6. Language and communication 7. Cognitive development 8. Emotion and consciousness 9. Conclusion.

MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse

This article presents an explicit method that can be reliably employed to identify metaphorically used words in discourse. Our aim is to provide metaphor scholars with a tool that may be flexibly applied to many research contexts. We present the “metaphor identification procedure” (MIP), followed by an example of how the procedure can be applied to identifying metaphorically used words in 1 text. We then suggest a format for reporting the results of MIP, and present the data from our case study describing the empirical reliability of the procedure, discuss several complications associated with using the procedure in practice, and then briefly compare MIP to other proposals on metaphor identification. The final section of the paper suggests ways that MIP may be employed in disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies of metaphor.

Irony in Talk Among Friends

This article reports the findings of a single study examining irony in talk among friends. Sixty-two 10-min conversations between college students and their friends were recorded and analyzed. Five main types of irony were found: jocularity, sarcasm, hyperbole, rhetorical questions, and understatements. These different forms of ironic language were part of 8% of all conversational turns. Analysis of these utterances revealed varying linguistic and social patterns and suggested several constraints on how and why people achieve ironic meaning. The implications of this conclusion for psychological theories of irony are discussed.

How to kick the bucket and not decompose: Analyzability and idiom processing

Idiomatic phrases differ in their degree of analyzability. Some idioms are highly decomposable with the meanings of their parts contributing independently to their overall figurative meanings (e.g., pop the question can be decomposed into pop meaning “suddenly make” and the question referring to “a marriage proposal”). Other idioms are nondecomposable because it is difficult to see any relation between a phrases individual components and the idioms figurative meaning (e.g., the parts of kick the bucket do not independently contribute to the figurative meaning of the phrase “to die”). The present studies investigated the role of analyzability or semantic decomposition in idiom processing. We expected that nondecomposable idioms should be processed more quickly than decomposable phrases because expressions such as kick the bucket are lexicalized and should be easier to access from the mental lexicon. However, Experiment 1 showed that nondecomposable idioms were processed more slowly than analyzable idiom phrases. Experiment 2 and 3 indicated that previous research demonstrating a processing advantage for syntactically frozen idioms was due to their degree of semantic decomposition. The results of these experiments suggest that idioms are initially processed in a compositional manner similar to understanding of more literal language. However, people still do not necessarily analyze the literal meanings of idioms during understanding of these figurative phrases.

Interpreting figurative meaning

1. Introduction 2. Identifying figurative language 3. Models of figurative language comprehension 4. Interpreting specific figures of speech 5. Indeterminacy of figurative experience 6. Factors shaping figurative language understanding 7. Broadening the scope of figurative language studies.

Embodied experience and linguistic meaning

What role does peoples embodied experiences have in their use and understanding of meaning? Most theories in cognitive science view meaning in terms of propositional structures that may be combined to form higher-order complexes in representing the meanings of conversations and texts. A newer approach seeks to capture meaning in terms of high-dimensional semantic space. Both views reflect the idea that meaning is best understood as abstract and disembodied symbols. My aim in this article is to make the case for an embodied view of linguistic meaning. This view provides a challenge to traditional approaches to linguistic meaning (although may not necessarily be entirely incompatible with them). I discuss several new lines of research from both linguistics and psychology that explore the importance of embodied perception and action in peoples understanding of words, phrases, and texts. These data provide strong evidence in favor of the idea that significant aspects of thought and language arises from, and is grounded in, embodiment.

Categorization and Metaphor Understanding

Glucksberg and Keysar (1990) have proposed a class-inclusion model of metaphor comprehension. This theory suggests that metaphors are not understood as implicit similes but are seen as class-inclusion statements in which the topic of a metaphor is assigned to a diagnostic, ad hoc category, whereas the metaphors vehicle is a prototypical member of that category. The author claims that verbal metaphors are not simply instantiations of temporary, ad hoc categories but reflect preexisting conceptual mappings in long-term memory that are metaphorically structured. Various evidence from cognitive linguistics, philosophy, and psychology are described in support of this claim. Evidence is also presented that supports, contrary to Glucksberg and Keysars position, the role of tacit conceptual metaphors in the comprehension of verbal metaphors in discourse.

Real and Imagined Body Movement Primes Metaphor Comprehension

We demonstrate in two experiments that real and imagined body movements appropriate to metaphorical phrases facilitate peoples immediate comprehension of these phrases. Participants first learned to make different body movements given specific cues. In two reading time studies, people were faster to understand a metaphorical phrase, such as push the argument, when they had previously just made an appropriate body action (e.g., a push movement) (Experiment 1), or imagined making a specific body movement (Experiment 2), than when they first made a mismatching body action (e.g., a chewing movement) or no movement. These findings support the idea that appropriate body action, or even imagined action, enhances peoples embodied, metaphorical construal of abstract concepts that are referred to in metaphorical phrases.

Syntactic frozenness in processing and remembering idioms

Abstract Three experiments examined the effect of syntactic frozenness on understanding and memory for idiomatic expressions. In Experiment 1 we established a frozenness continuum by asking subjects to judge whether idioms in different syntactic forms maintained their idiomatic meanings. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that subjects processed idiomatic expressions more quickly than they did nonidiomatic, control strings. Moreover, subjects are faster at processing frozen idioms than they are at understanding flexible ones. The final experiment found that the degree of syntactic frozenness has an effect on memory for idioms in that flexible idioms were recalled more often than were frozen ones. These data overall support the idea that idioms are part of the normal lexicon, but are accessed differentially according to their degree of syntactic frozenness.

Pragmatics in understanding what is said

A central claim in cognitive science is that speakers often say things which underdetermine what they imply by their use of utterances in context. For example, in uttering Jane has three children a speaker might only say that Jane has at least three children and may have more than three, but the speakers utterance implicates that Jane has exactly three children. Many scholars following Grice have argued from such observations that pragmatics plays only a small part in determining what speakers say, as opposed to what they conversationally imply or implicate. We examined peoples intuitions about the distinction between what speakers say, or what is said, and what they implicate by different indicative utterances, such as Jane has three children. The data from four experiments demonstrate that people do not equate a minimal meaning (i.e., Jane has at least three children and may have more than three) with what a speaker says, but assume that enriched pragmatics plays a significant role in determining what is said (i.e., Jane has exactly three children). People further recognize a distinction between what speakers say, or what is said, and what speakers implicate in particular contexts (e.g., Jane is married). These data lend support to theories of utterance interpretation in cognitive science that pragmatics strongly influences peoples understanding of what speakers both say and communicate.