Dear all
The following thoughts were prompted (or reactivated) by reading the recent
interesting paper by Ira Noveck, Maryse Bianco and Alain Castry describing
some experimental work on metaphor processing (the paper was publicised
on this list). I was going to address the authors specifically but then
thought
the issue might be of wider interest to people involved in relevance theory.
However, be warned that this is not a short message, but more like a short
essay. I would very much appreciate corrections/comments if anyone makes
it through to the end.
Ira Noveck et al.'s basic position is that metaphorical utterances take more
processing effort and have more cognitive effects than 'non-figurative
equivalents'.
Building on some work by Ray Gibbs (1990), they ran some experiments to test
this hypothesis and found that the results supported it. Their claim is
that this is precisely what the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor
predicts.
Gibbs (1994) also takes the 'extra processing effort' prediction to follow
from
RT and finds it to be at fault on these very grounds: '... the psychological
research clearly shows that listeners do not ordinarily devote extra
processing
resources to understanding metaphors compared with more literal utterances.
The metaphor-as-loose-talk view, ... may not see metaphors as violations of
communication norms but still incorrectly assumes that metaphors, and other
tropes ... obligatorily demand additional cognitive effort to be
understood' (p.232). It is this psychological evidence that Noveck et al.
are calling into question.
However, the opposite view of what RT predicts about metaphor processing is
also to be found, espoused by another staunch relevance theorist. In his
excellent
book on relevance and poetic effects, Pilkington (2000) discusses
psycholinguistic
work by Gibbs and by Gerrig (1989) which seems to show that 'utterances
used metaphorically do not necessarily take longer to process than the same
utterances
used literally' (p.89). According to Pilkington 'the relevance theory
account of
metaphor interpretation is quite consistent with [these] psycholinguistic
results' (p.90).
So what's going on here? On the face of it, it looks as if someone has to
be wrong
about what the RT prediction is. Before I check back on what the founding
father
and mother have to say, note that talk of extra or more processing effort
raises the
question of 'more than what?'. What is the metaphorical utterance being
compared
with? I think there are two different comparisons at work and that this
may be the
source of the apparently contradictory positions.
Sperber & Wilson (1985/86), discussing such highly conventional metaphors as
'Jeremy is a lion', which communicates the strong implicature that Jeremy is
brave, say that such metaphors 'must suggest some further line of thought if
their relative indirectness and its extra processing cost is to be
justified ...'
(p.167) and, of course, this point holds all the more for more creative
metaphors.
The processing effort comparison here is between uttering 'Jeremy is a
lion' and
uttering 'Jeremy is brave', or between 'You are a piglet' and 'You are a
grubby kid'. It is this sort of comparison that Noveck et al. have in mind.
However, consider now an example in Sperber (2000, p.132): 'John is a
soldier'.
In a particular context (A), a hearer might access an interpretation along
the lines
that John is very dutiful, loyal, obedient, a team-player,
self-sacrificing, but not
including that John is a member of the military, has weapons, etc. This
would be a
case of a loose or metaphorical use of 'soldier'. In a different context
(B), the 'literal' properties of being a member of the military, being
trained to kill, etc. might be accessed instead. In both cases, as ever,
the hearer follows a path of least effort in accessing the interpretation
and stops when his expectation of relevance is satisfied. The issue of
different degrees of processing effort is not Sperber's concern here, so is
not discussed, but it seems clear that there is no prediction that there
will be any significant processing effort difference between the
loose/metaphorical use in context A and the literal use in context B. It
also seems pretty clear that in certain contexts the loose/metaphorical
reading is going to be easier to access than the literal one. I think
these are the sorts of comparison that Gerrig and Pilkington are making,
and they are quite different from that discussed in the previous paragraph.
So is that it? - problem solved? Probably not entirely. I'm not deeply
enough steeped in the full weighty mass of psycholinguistic experiments in
this area to be sure of my ground here, but I assume that not only cases
such as the 'soldier' one, but also cases like the 'piglet/dirty kid' one
have been tested and have given a result of no significant difference in
processing effort/time (a word of confirmation from Ray Gibbs and/or Sam
Glucksberg would be most welcome at this point). If so, this would still
seem to be at odds with the RT account, unless, of course, the measures
(reading times, etc) used in the experiments simply cannot tap the sort of
effort differences at issue.
Furthermore, there seems to be a striking difference in the psycho results
that
I'm aware of between metaphorical predications and metaphorical referring
expressions. While the predications (which all the examples so far discussed
are) apparently take no more effort than literal paraphrases, metaphorical
reference (e.g. 'The princess' used to refer to a cat, 'That junkyard' used to
refer to someone's office) does take significantly longer than literal
reference.
This was pointed out by Gibbs himself (1990) and reinforced by Onishi &
Murphy (1993), who tried everything they could to ease the way for
metaphorical
references, but had to conclude that there just is a heavier processing
load for
metaphorical referring expressions than for corresponding literal ones.
Of course, there are plenty of possible explanations for this
reference/predication
difference, some of which are discussed by Gibbs and O&M.
Now, Noveck et al.'s experiments in which a metaphorical/literal processing
difference was found were all cases of referring expressions. So their
results further reinforce those of Gibbs and O&M, but they could therefore
be subject to an
explanation for the extra effort in terms of special properties of
reference that
make metaphor difficult when used in this way. It might be of greater
interest for
the RT prediction about 'piglet/dirty child', etc. if there were
experiments which
revealed effort differences when these are used in predicating properties
of an
already determined referent. I wonder if these are planned ...
Best wishes, Robyn
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References:
Gerrig, R.1989. Empirical constraints on computational theories of
metaphor. Cognitive Science 13, 235-241.
Gibbs, R. 1990. Comprehending figurative referential descriptions.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 16, 56-66.
Gibbs, R. 1994. The Poetics of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Noveck, I. et al. 2001. The costs and benefits of metaphor. Metaphor
and Symbol 16, 109-121.
Onishi, K. & Murphy, G. 1993. Metaphoric reference: When metaphors are
not understood as easily as literal expressions. Memory & Cognition 21,
763-772.
Pilkington, A. 2000. Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective.
John Benjamins.
Sperber, D. 2000. Metarepresentations in an evolutionary perspective.
In D. Sperber (ed.) Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective,
117-137. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1985/86. Loose talk. Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 86, 153-171.
--------------------
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Robyn Carston
Department of Phonetics & Linguistics, UCL
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
Tel: + 44 020 7679 3174
Fax: + 44 020 7383 4108
URL http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/robyn/home.htm
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