Interpreting what speakers say and implicate.

The traditional view in pragmatic theory is that a distinction exists between what speakers say and what they mean, communicate, or implicate in context. For example, when uttering Jane has three children, a speaker might only say that "Jane has three children but may have more than three," but the speaker implicates that "Jane has exactly three children." Under this view, pragmatics plays only a small role in determining what speakers say and has a primary part in interpreting speaker's intended messages. My aim in this article is to challenge this view. I describe empirical work showing that pragmatics has a fundamental role in determining both what speakers say and implicate. Thus, when a speaker utters Jane has three children, enriched pragmatic information is used to infer that the speaker says "Jane has exactly three children" and that in specific contexts, the speaker can go on to express additional pragmatic meanings, such as "Jane is married" or "Jane is very busy because she has three children." I also describe work on the importance of complex pragmatic, metarepresentational reasoning in understanding irony and metaphor. Finally, I briefly discuss the relevance of these new developments in pragmatics for neurolinguistic research.

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 speaker's 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 people's 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 people's understanding of what speakers both say and communicate.

What proverb understanding reveals about how people think.

The ability to understand proverbial sayings, such as a rolling stone gathers no moss, has been of great interest to researchers in many areas of psychology. Most psychologists assume that understanding the figurative meanings of proverbs requires various kinds of higher order cognitive abilities. The authors review the findings on proverb interpretation to examine the question of what proverb use and understanding reveals about the ways normal and dysfunctional individuals think. The widely held idea that failure to provide a figurative interpretation of a proverb necessarily reflects a deficit in specialized abstract thinking is rejected. Moreover, the ability to correctly explain what a proverb means does not necessarily imply that an individual can think abstractly. Various empirical evidence, nonetheless, suggests that the ability to understand many proverbs reveals the presence of metaphorical schemes that are ubiquitous in everyday thought.

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 metaphor's 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 Keysar's position, the role of tacit conceptual metaphors in the comprehension of verbal metaphors in discourse.

Semantic analyzability in children's understanding of idioms.

This study investigated the role of semantic analyzability in children's understanding of idioms. Kindergartners and first, third, and fourth graders listened to idiomatic expressions either alone or at the end of short story contexts. Their task was to explain verbally the intended meanings of these phrases and then to choose their correct idiomatic interpretations. The idioms presented to the children differed in their degree of analyzability. Some idioms were highly analyzable or decomposable, with the meanings of their parts contributing independently to their overall figurative meanings. Other idioms were nondecomposable because it was difficult to see any relation between a phrase's individual components and the idiom's figurative meaning. The results showed that younger children (kindergartners and first graders) understood decomposable idioms better than they did nondecomposable phrases. Older children (third and fourth graders) understood both kinds of idioms equally well in supporting contexts, but were better at interpreting decomposable idioms than they were at understanding nondecomposable idioms without contextual information. These findings demonstrate that young children better understand idiomatic phrases whose individual parts independently contribute to their overall figurative meanings.

Authorial intentions and metaphor comprehension.

Three experiments investigated the role of authorial intentions in metaphor comprehension. In these studies, subjects read metaphoric (e.g., "A family album is like a museum"), literal (e.g., "An art gallery is like a museum"), and anomalous (e.g., "A tortoise shell is like an art gallery") comparisons and rated their degree of meaningfulness (Experiment 1), made speeded decisions as to whether each phrase was meaningful or not (Experiment 2), or wrote out interpretations of each comparison statement (Experiment 3). The subjects were told that the comparisons were written either by famous 20th century poets or by a computer program that randomly generated the statements from a list of words. Our general hypothesis was that knowing that intentional agents (the poets) authored the different comparisons should facilitate subjects' comprehension of the metaphors. Experiment 1 showed that subjects rated both metaphoric and literal comparisons as being more meaningful in the poet condition than when these statements were supposedly written by computer. Experiment 2 demonstrated that subjects were faster in making their meaningfulness judgments for metaphors in the poet condition than in the computer context, but that subjects were also slower in rejecting anomalous comparisons when these were supposedly written by the poets. Experiment 3 indicated that subjects produced more meanings or interpretations for comparisons presumably written by poets than by computer. These results highlight the importance of implied, authorial intentions in understanding metaphorical statements. We discuss the implications of this work for psycholinguistic theories of figurative language comprehension, as well as for theories of literary interpretation.

Conceptual knowledge in the interpretation of idioms.

The authors examined how people determine the contextual appropriateness of idioms. In Experiment 1, idioms referring to the same temporal stage of a conceptual prototype were judged to be more similar in meaning than idioms referring to different temporal stages. In Experiment 2, idioms in a prototypical temporal sequence were more meaningful than idioms in sentences that violated the temporal sequence. In Experiment 3, idioms referring to the same stage of a conceptual prototype were differentiable on the basis of conceptual information. The conceptual coherence between idioms and contexts facilitated the processing speed of idioms in Experiment 4. Experiment 5 showed that speakers can recover the underlying conceptual metaphors that link an idiom to its figurative meaning. Experiment 6 showed that the metaphoric information reflected in the lexical makeup of idioms also determined the metaphoric appropriateness of idioms in certain contexts.

Idioms and mental imagery: the metaphorical motivation for idiomatic meaning.

We conducted three experiments to investigate the mental images associated with idiomatic phrases in English. Our hypothesis was that people should have strong conventional images for many idioms and that the regularity in people's knowledge of their images for idioms is due to the conceptual metaphors motivating the figurative meanings of idioms. In the first study, subjects were asked to form and describe their mental images for different idiomatic expressions. Subjects were then asked a series of detailed questions about their images regarding the causes and effects of different events within their images. We found high consistency in subjects' images of idioms with similar figurative meanings despite differences in their surface forms (e.g., spill the beans and let the cat out of the bag). Subjects' responses to detailed questions about their images also showed a high degree of similarity in their answers. Further examination of subjects' imagery protocols supports the idea that the conventional images and knowledge associated with idioms are constrained by the conceptual metaphors (e.g., the MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE ENTITIES) which motivate the figurative meanings of idioms. The results of two control studies showed that the conventional images associated with idioms are not solely based on their figurative meanings (Experiment 2) and that the images associated with literal phrases (e.g., spill the peas) were quite varied and unlikely to be constrained by conceptual metaphor (Experiment 3). These findings support the view that idioms are not "dead" metaphors with their meanings being arbitrarily determined. Rather, the meanings of many idioms are motivated by speakers' tacit knowledge of the conceptual metaphors underlying the meanings of these figurative phrases.

Why boys will be boys and girls will be girls: understanding colloquial tautologies.

What do tautological phrases such as Boys will be boys, A promise is a promise, or War is war mean and how are they understood? These phrases literally appear to be uninformative, yet speakers frequently use such expressions in conversation and listeners have little difficulty comprehending them. Understanding nominal tautologies requires that listeners/readers infer the speaker's attitude toward the noun phrase (e.g., boys) mentioned in the sentence. The purpose of the present studies was to investigate the role of context, syntactic form, and lexical content in the interpretation of nominal tuatologies. Two studies are reported in which subjects rated the acceptability of different tautological constructions either alone (Experiment 1) or with supporting contextual information (Experiment 2). The results of these studies provide evidence that colloquial tautologies can be interpreted differently in different contexts, but that there are important regularities in the syntactic form and lexical content of these phrases which influence how they are understood. Our findings highlight the importance of speakers/listeners' stereotypical understanding of people, activities, and concrete objects in the use and understanding of different tautological expressions. The implications of this research for psycholinguistic theories of conversational inference and indirect language use are discussed.

Comprehending figurative referential descriptions.

A common way of referring to people is with figurative language. People can be referred to metaphorically, as in calling a terrible boxer "a creampuff," or metonymically, as in calling a naval admiral "the brass." The present studies investigated the anaphoric inferences that occur during comprehension of figurative referential descriptions. Subjects read short narratives, each ending in either a literal or figurative description of another person. Immediately after the last line of each text, the anaphoric antecedent for the description of another person. Immediately after the last line of each text, the anaphoric antecedent for the description was presented in a probe recognition task. The results of three experiments indicated that metaphoric and metonymic referential descriptions reinstate their antecedents in the course of comprehension. Subjects were faster at reinstating the antecedents for literal referential descriptions than at reinstating metaphoric and metonymic descriptions. Moreover, people understand metaphoric referential descriptions more easily than they do metonymic ones. The implications of these findings for theories of anaphora resolution and figurative language comprehension are discussed.

Psycholinguistic studies on the syntactic behavior of idioms.

Six experiments examined why some idioms can be syntactically changed and still retain their figurative meanings (e.g., John laid down the law can be passivized as The law was laid down by John), while other idioms cannot be syntactically altered without losing their figurative meanings (e.g., John kicked the bucket cannot be passivized into The bucket was kicked by John). Our thesis was that the syntactic behavior of idioms is determined, to a large extent, but speakers' assumptions about the way in which parts of idioms contribute to their figurative interpretations as a whole. The results of our studies indicated that idioms whose individual semantic components contribute to their overall figurative meanings (e.g., go out on a limb) were judged as more syntactically flexible or productive than nondecomposable phrases (e.g., kick the bucket). These findings suggested that idioms do not form a unique class of linguistic items (e.g., as "dead" metaphors), but can share many of the same compositional properties normally associated with more "literal" language. The implications of these data for theories of syntactic productivity of idioms and for models of idiom comprehension are discussed.

Speakers' assumptions about the lexical flexibility of idioms.

In three experiments, we examined why some idioms can be lexically altered and still retain their figurative meanings (e.g., John buttoned his lips about Mary can be changed into John fastened his lips about Mary and still mean "John didn't say anything about Mary"), whereas other idioms cannot be lexically altered without losing their figurative meanings (e.g., John kicked the bucket, meaning "John died," loses its idiomatic meaning when changed into John kicked the pail). Our hypothesis was that the lexical flexibility of idioms is determined by speakers' assumptions about the ways in which parts of idioms contribute to their figurative interpretations as a whole. The results of the three experiments indicated that idioms whose individual semantic components contribute to their overall figurative meanings (e.g., go out on a limb) were judged as less disrupted by changes in their lexical items (e.g., go out on a branch) than were nondecomposable idioms (e.g., kick the bucket) when their individual words were altered (e.g., punt the pail). These findings lend support to the idea that both the syntactic productivity and the lexical makeup of idioms are matters of degree, depending on the idioms' compositional properties. This conclusion suggests that idioms do not form a unique class of linguistic items, but share many of the properties of more literal language.

The concept of scripts in understanding stories.

Subjects listened to a series of stories based on everyday activities, such as taking a shower, which in Schank's (1975a,b) terminology have familiar scripts. Script implications, like getting undressed, either were made explicit in the story or were left implicit. Unpredictable script variables, such as the temperature of the water, were specified. On an immediate sentence recognition test, subjects detected changes in the script variables more accurately than changes in the explicitness of the script implications. After a delay, test sentences with added or deleted script implications were falsely recognized and were judged to be as familiar as test sentences with no changes. The results supported the hypothesis that the memory representation for stories includes relevant script knowledge.