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2012 | 21/2 | 65-78

Article title

Idiom Comprehension: Two Approaches

Authors

Content

Title variants

Languages of publication

EN

Abstracts

EN
Basing on the two most influential theories in the literature on idiom comprehension (Glucksberg 2001; Vega Moreno 2003, 2004, 2005) as well as on the account of familiar metaphor comprehension (Wilson – Carston 2006), the present author proposes an account of comprehension of familiar idioms as metaphorical expressions. Unfamiliar metaphors are comprehended on-line in a relevance-guided comprehension procedure which involves adjustment of concepts encoded in idiom constituents. When the metaphorical denotation of the idiom is memorised, the well-known idiomatic string is comprehended just as familiar metaphors in the sense of Wilson – Carston (2006), i.e. in the process of disambiguation of two encoded senses.

Contributors

  • University of Warsaw

References

  • Blasko, D., and Cynthia Connine. 1993. “Effects of familiarity and aptness on metaphor processing”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 19: 295–308.
  • Bowdle, B., and Dedre Gentner. 2005. “The career of metaphor”. Psychological Review 112: 193–216.
  • Fernando, Chitra. 1996. Idioms and Idiomaticity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Gentner, D., and Phillip Wolff. 1997. “Alignment in the processing of metaphor”. Journal of Memory and Language 37: 331–55.
  • Giora, Rachel. 2002. “Literal vs. figurative language: different or equal?”. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 487–506.
  • Giora, Rachel. 2003. On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Glucksberg, Sam. 2001. Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Glucksberg, Sam. 2004. “On the automaticity of pragmatic process: a modular proposal”. [In:] Noveck, Ira A., and Dan Sperber (eds.) Experimental Pragmatics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 72–93.
  • Glucksberg, Sam, Matthew S. McGlone, and Deanna Manfredi. 1997. “Property attribution in metaphor comprehension”. Journal of Memory and Language 36: 50–67.
  • Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 2006. “A deflationary account of metaphor”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 18: 171–203.
  • Vega-Moreno, Rosa E. 2003. “Relevance Theory and the construction of idiom meaning”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 15: 83–104.
  • Vega-Moreno, Rosa E. 2004. “Metaphor interpretation and emergence”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 16: 297–322.
  • Vega-Moreno, Rosa E. 2005. “Idioms, transparency and pragmatic inference”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 17.
  • Wilson, Deirdre, and Robin Carston. 2006. “Metaphor, relevance and the ‘emergent property’ issue”. Mind & Language 21: 404–433.
  • Wilson, Deirdre, and Robin Carston. 2007. “A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc Concepts”. [In:] N. Burton-Roberts (ed.) Pragmatics. (London: Palgrave), 230–259.

Document Type

Publication order reference

Identifiers

YADDA identifier

bwmeta1.element.desklight-7f96310b-9a72-46ca-86c1-8bad13fae17b
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