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Figurativity

Cognitive, because it’s social
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Abstract

We’ve long recognized that figurative language is social in multiple ways. But new developments in both socio-cognitive neuroscience and linguistic pragmatics suggests that the extent to which all language, figurative and everything else, might be considered social has been underestimated. This chapter first reviews the three main neurally-driven and evolutionarily-constructed powerful social drives in people, motivating us to form social connections, to maintain or improve our status in social networks and hierarchies, and to form a sense-of-self derived from social expectations. The chapter then covers the 9 or 10 different ways in which figurative language, non-figurative language, indirect language and a handful of other processes on the “other-side-of-meaning” (Colston, 2019), exist fundamentally to service those powerful social motivations, several of which are not usually considered in discussions of the sociality of figurative and other language.

Abstract

We’ve long recognized that figurative language is social in multiple ways. But new developments in both socio-cognitive neuroscience and linguistic pragmatics suggests that the extent to which all language, figurative and everything else, might be considered social has been underestimated. This chapter first reviews the three main neurally-driven and evolutionarily-constructed powerful social drives in people, motivating us to form social connections, to maintain or improve our status in social networks and hierarchies, and to form a sense-of-self derived from social expectations. The chapter then covers the 9 or 10 different ways in which figurative language, non-figurative language, indirect language and a handful of other processes on the “other-side-of-meaning” (Colston, 2019), exist fundamentally to service those powerful social motivations, several of which are not usually considered in discussions of the sociality of figurative and other language.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Art: My Dancing Mind vii
  4. Prologue 1
  5. Introduction 11
  6. Part I. New windows into cognition and communication
  7. Metaphor in The Cancer Poetry Project 31
  8. Narrative experiences of metaphor 45
  9. Researching embodied metaphor production through improvisational dance practice 63
  10. Feeling for speaking 77
  11. Multimodal body, multimodal mind, multimodal communication 95
  12. Fictive motion in the wild 109
  13. Part II. Account expansion, flexibility, or integration
  14. Extended CMT and the dynamic systems theory of metaphor 131
  15. Communication, comprehension, and interpretation 143
  16. Between embodiment and usage 157
  17. Metaphors and meaning-making in young people’s talk about climate change 191
  18. Experiential viewpoint, simile and dynamicity in discourse 205
  19. Metaphor and elaboration in context 223
  20. Part III. Influencers and drivers
  21. Figurativity 243
  22. Conceptual blending and memes 265
  23. How to talk about motion without verbs 293
  24. Defaultness vs. constructionism 305
  25. Relevance theory perspectives on web-mediated communication 325
  26. Language happens 341
  27. Index 357
Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond
This chapter is in the book Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond
https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.9.13col

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Art: My Dancing Mind vii
  4. Prologue 1
  5. Introduction 11
  6. Part I. New windows into cognition and communication
  7. Metaphor in The Cancer Poetry Project 31
  8. Narrative experiences of metaphor 45
  9. Researching embodied metaphor production through improvisational dance practice 63
  10. Feeling for speaking 77
  11. Multimodal body, multimodal mind, multimodal communication 95
  12. Fictive motion in the wild 109
  13. Part II. Account expansion, flexibility, or integration
  14. Extended CMT and the dynamic systems theory of metaphor 131
  15. Communication, comprehension, and interpretation 143
  16. Between embodiment and usage 157
  17. Metaphors and meaning-making in young people’s talk about climate change 191
  18. Experiential viewpoint, simile and dynamicity in discourse 205
  19. Metaphor and elaboration in context 223
  20. Part III. Influencers and drivers
  21. Figurativity 243
  22. Conceptual blending and memes 265
  23. How to talk about motion without verbs 293
  24. Defaultness vs. constructionism 305
  25. Relevance theory perspectives on web-mediated communication 325
  26. Language happens 341
  27. Index 357
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