The processing of metonymy: Evidence from eye movements.

Abstract

The authors investigated the time course of the processing of metonymic expressions in comparison with literal ones in 2 eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 considered the processing of sentences containing place-for-institution metonymies such as the convent in That blasphemous woman had to answer to the convent; it was found that such expressions were of similar difficulty to sentences containing literal interpretations of the same expressions. In contrast, expressions without a relevant metonymic interpretation caused immediate difficulty. Experiment 2 found similar results for place-for-event metonymies such as A lot of Americans protested during Vietnam, except that the difficulty with expressions without a relevant metonymic interpretation was somewhat delayed. The authors argue that these findings are incompatible with models of figurative language processing in which either the literal sense is accessed first or the figurative sense is accessed first. Instead, they support an account in which both senses can be accessed immediately, perhaps through a single under-specified representation.

Sustained meaning activation for polysemous but not homonymous words: Evidence from EEG

“…Sustained activation of both meanings of polysemous words supports an account of representation in which the multiple senses are stored together. The current results do not directly address the nature of polysemous representations, but they are compatible with the possibility that polysemes exist as a basic or common, core representation, which could be seen as underspecified (Frazier & Rayner, 1990;Frisson & Pickering, 1999). The core representation comprises semantic information common across the different senses of the polysemous word (e.g., "rabbit" might include +animate, +farm animal, +edible, +meat]), which can be expanded online for complete comprehension when the context is available (or perhaps even when it is not).…”

“…The core representation comprises semantic information common across the different senses of the polysemous word (e.g., "rabbit" might include +animate, +farm animal, +edible, +meat]), which can be expanded online for complete comprehension when the context is available (or perhaps even when it is not). In the absence of contextual information or if the context is vague with respect to the appropriate interpretation, the representation could remain underspecified (Frisson & Pickering, 1999). An alternative to an underspecified polysemous representation is one that is semantically rich comprising all relevant information associated with a particular word form.…”

eDom: Norming software and relative meaning frequencies for 544 English homonyms

“…These data reveal that grammatical class is another important property to consider when using homonymous stimuli to study word and discourse comprehension, particularly with respect to nouns and verbs. It also opens the possibility that the different ambiguity effects that have been reported across grammatical classes are the result of a confound with relative meaning frequency (Frazier & Rayner, 1990;Frisson & Pickering, 1999;Pickering & Frisson, 2001), although Mirman et al (2010) observed different effects for noun-noun versus noun-verb homonyms, even when controlling for a measure of relative meaning frequency.…”

Online interpretation of scalar quantifiers: Insight into the semantics–pragmatics interface

“…The fact that utterances are interpreted at both a semantic and pragmatic level has lead many to question how these meanings are integrated over the course of real-time processing. Past research has generally pursued these issues by exploring how contextual information influences reaction times for sentence comprehension and has demonstrated that pragmatic processing is extremely rapid, often beginning before phrasal completion (Frisson & Pickering, 1999;Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, & Carlson, 1999). However, these studies leave open the question of whether the pragmatic interpretation is ever preceded by some degree of semantic interpretation, as most linguistic theories would predict.…”

“…General agreement about the existence of these levels of interpretation contrasts with controversy in the field over exact boundaries between these representations and their relationship in real-time processing. Past research has demonstrated that pragmatic processing is rapid, often beginning before phrasal completion (Frisson & Pickering, 1999;Sedivy et al, 1999). However, they leave open the question of whether the pragmatic interpretation is preceded by some degree of semantic interpretation, as most linguistic theories would predict.…”