Of false friends and familiar foes: Comparing native and non-native understanding of figurative phrases

Abstract

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Contributions of semantic richness to the processing of idioms

“…It is increasingly clear that in the processing of idioms, variables such as familiarity, decomposability and transparency are not independent (Carrol et al, 2018;Libben & Titone, 2008), and that they may exert an influence at different points during the comprehension process (Titone & Libben, 2014). Our results suggest that other properties also contribute, and the imageability of a phrase, the degree of physical interaction it involves, and the level of emotional valence (whether positive or negative)…”

“…Ultimately, increasing familiarity may override other properties (e.g. Abel, 2003;Carrol et al, 2018;Keysar & Bly, 1995, or at least mean that their effects manifest only for less well-known items (Titone & Libben, 2008), where more effort is required to actively work out the intended meaning. We saw some evidence of this in the interactions with familiarity in our data, where interference with the figurative meaning seemed to be negligible for the most familiar phrases.…”

“…Here, familiarity may modulate any effect, as this has been proposed to influence how idioms are represented and understood, regardless of whether they are decomposable or not (e.g. Abel, 2003;Carrol, Littlemore & Dowens, 2018;Libben & Titone, 2008). Semantic richness in general may therefore have the effect of enhancing activation of idiom meaning for highly familiar phrases, while effects for less familiar phrases (which are less strongly encoded in the lexicon) may be less apparent.…”

Understanding Metaphors: Problems for Chinese Readers

“…In this case, since they had already understood most of the sentence, they were more likely to believe they had understood the included metaphors. Third, familiarity, a major element for learners to successfully interpret figurative language (Carrol et al, 2018), tends to affect their judgement of difficulty. Some metaphors contain many words that seem familiar but in fact may have more than one meaning.…”

Metonymies are more literal than metaphors: evidence from ratings of German idioms

“…Some contend transparency to be very closely related or identical to decomposability (Abel, 2003;Gibbs, Nayak, & Cutting, 1989;Gross, 1996;Zwitserlood, 1994), i.e., the degree to which an idiom's figurative meaning can be ascertained from its component words (Libben & Titone, 2008;Nordmann & Jambazova, 2016). Others clearly demonstrate how idioms can be both non-decomposable and transparent (Nunberg et al, 1994) or show how transparency and decomposability correlate in ratings, but are different properties (Carrol, Littlemore, & Gillon-Dowens, 2018). On a second account, transparency is the ease with which an idiom can be comprehended (Boers & Demecheleer, 2001).…”