Conceptual knowledge in the interpretation of idioms.

Abstract

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.

On metaphoric representation

“…One very active line of research is in the comprehension of idioms that are proposed to reflect underlying conceptual metaphors (e.g., Gibbs, 1993;Gibbs and O'Brien, 1990;Nayak and Gibbs, 1990). According to this work, many idioms are understood by virtue of conventional conceptual metaphors such as ANGER IS PRESSURE IN A CLOSED CONTAINER (see Glucksberg et al, 1993, for an opposing view).…”

Complementary perspectives on metaphor: Cognitive linguistics and relevance theory

“…These data provide evidence that the contextual appropriateness of metaphorical language is partly due to the overlap in the way contexts and speaker's utterances metaphorically conceptualize certain abstract concepts. Similarly, that the availability of conceptual metaphors facilitates metaphor understanding has been shown in various psycholinguistic studies (Albritton et al, 1995;Gibbs, 1992;Nayak and Gibbs, 1990). When primed by an appropriate conceptual metaphor, people understand metaphorical utterances faster than without priming.…”

“…Finally, psycholinguistic studies suggest that hypothesis (4) might be true to some extent (Gibbs et al, 1997a). This work includes studies investigating people's mental imagery for conventional metaphors, including idioms and proverbs (Gibbs and O'Brien, 1990;Gibbs et al, 1997b), people's context-sensitive judgments about the figurative meanings of idioms in context (Nayak and Gibbs, 1990), people's immediate processing of idioms (Gibbs et al, 1997a), people's responses to questions about time (Boroditsky and Ramscar, 2002;Gentner and Boroditsky, 2002), readers' understanding of metaphorical time expressions (McGlone and Harding, 1998), and studies looking at the embodied foundation for metaphoric meaning (Gibbs, 2006c;Gibbs et al, 2004. At the same time, Coulson (2001) describes several neuropsychological studies whose results are consistent with some of the claims of blending theory, particularly the idea that understanding metaphors demands various blending processes, which require cognitive effort.…”

“…For example, Nayak and Gibbs (1990) show that people tacitly recognize that idiomatic expressions like ''blow your stack'' are more appropriate, if they are used in a context that is structured around the idea of ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER, compared to alternative idioms having roughly the same figurative meaning, such as ''bite your head off'', which is motivated by a different conceptual metaphor (e.g., ANGER IS ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR). Moreover, people find certain idioms appropriate to use in contexts in which all the correspondences arising from the underlying conceptual metaphor are consistent with the information in the context (Gibbs, 1992).…”

Cognitive linguistics and metaphor research: past successes, skeptical questions, future challenges

“…Various psycholinguistic experimental methods have been devised to assess whether (a) people conceptualize of certain topics via metaphor, (b) whether conceptual metaphors assist people in making sense of WHY verbal expressions, particularly idioms and metaphors mean what they do, and (c) whether people access conceptual metaphors during their immediate, online production and comprehension of conventional and novel language. This work includes studies investigating people s mental imagery for conventional metaphors, including idioms and proverbs (Gibbs & O Brien, 1990;Gibbs, Strom & Spivey-Knowlton, 1997), people s context-sensitive judgments about the figurative meanings of idioms in context (Nayak & Gibbs, 1990), people s immediate processing of idioms (Gibbs, Bogdonovich, Sykes, & Barr, 1997), people s responses to questions about time (Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002;Gentner, Imai, & Boroditsky, 2002), readers understanding of metaphorical time expressions (McGlone & Harding, 1998), and studies looking at the embodied foundation for figurative meanings. Let me briefly discuss this last line of evidence, because this work embraces a research strategy to deal with the problem of circularity of reasoning in cognitive linguistic analyses.…”