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Experiential tests of figurative meaning construction

  • Raymond W. Gibbs
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Aspects of Meaning Construction
This chapter is in the book Aspects of Meaning Construction

Abstract

One of the major claims of recent cognitive linguistics research is that metonymy constitutes a fundamental scheme of human cognition and is not just a rhetorical device employed for specific communicative purposes. The work of Klaus-Uwe Panther and others has suggested that certain metonymies are natural inference schemes operating during many aspects of language production and understanding. This chapter explores the relations between cognitive linguistic ideas on conceptual metonymy and recent psycholinguistic experiments examining online meaning construction. I suggest that there is no direct evidence supporting the idea that conceptual metonymies are immediately recruited during metonymic language processing, but that this gap is due to the difficulties in testing whether very abstract schemes are accessed during online meaning construction. Nonetheless, there exists various experimental support for other cognitive linguistic claims about metonymy, including the importance of metonymy for highlighting certain aspects of discourse topics, the interaction of metonymy and grammatical structure in sentence comprehension, and the idea that conceptual metonymies may interact with pragmatic information to constrain specific interpretations of metonymic utterances.

Abstract

One of the major claims of recent cognitive linguistics research is that metonymy constitutes a fundamental scheme of human cognition and is not just a rhetorical device employed for specific communicative purposes. The work of Klaus-Uwe Panther and others has suggested that certain metonymies are natural inference schemes operating during many aspects of language production and understanding. This chapter explores the relations between cognitive linguistic ideas on conceptual metonymy and recent psycholinguistic experiments examining online meaning construction. I suggest that there is no direct evidence supporting the idea that conceptual metonymies are immediately recruited during metonymic language processing, but that this gap is due to the difficulties in testing whether very abstract schemes are accessed during online meaning construction. Nonetheless, there exists various experimental support for other cognitive linguistic claims about metonymy, including the importance of metonymy for highlighting certain aspects of discourse topics, the interaction of metonymy and grammatical structure in sentence comprehension, and the idea that conceptual metonymies may interact with pragmatic information to constrain specific interpretations of metonymic utterances.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors ix
  4. Introduction. The construction of meaning in language 1
  5. Part I: Metonymy and metaphor
  6. Experiential tests of figurative meaning construction 19
  7. High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction 33
  8. The role of metonymy in meaning construction at discourse level 51
  9. Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar 77
  10. Arguing the case against coercion 99
  11. When Zidane is not simply Zidane, and Bill Gates is not just Bill Gates 125
  12. Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 143
  13. Part II: Mental spaces and conceptual blending
  14. Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns 171
  15. The construction of meaning in relative clauses 189
  16. Constraints on inferential constructions 207
  17. The construction of vagueness 225
  18. Communication or memory mismatch? 247
  19. Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans 265
  20. Index of authors 283
  21. Index of subjects 285
  22. Index of metonymies and metaphors 289
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.136.04gib

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors ix
  4. Introduction. The construction of meaning in language 1
  5. Part I: Metonymy and metaphor
  6. Experiential tests of figurative meaning construction 19
  7. High-level metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction 33
  8. The role of metonymy in meaning construction at discourse level 51
  9. Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar 77
  10. Arguing the case against coercion 99
  11. When Zidane is not simply Zidane, and Bill Gates is not just Bill Gates 125
  12. Collocational overlap can guide metaphor interpretation 143
  13. Part II: Mental spaces and conceptual blending
  14. Constructing the meanings of personal pronouns 171
  15. The construction of meaning in relative clauses 189
  16. Constraints on inferential constructions 207
  17. The construction of vagueness 225
  18. Communication or memory mismatch? 247
  19. Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans 265
  20. Index of authors 283
  21. Index of subjects 285
  22. Index of metonymies and metaphors 289
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