Go Figure 2013: “Understanding Figures of Speech”

1. Go Figure 2013:   “Understanding Figures of Speech” • Figure of speech: a use of a word or phrase which departs from its literal interpretation. • metaphor, simile, hyperbole, understatement (meiosis, litotes), metonymy (synecdoche), irony, …. zeugma, alliteration … Natural classes of phenomena? Clearly definable? (What is the definition of metaphor?)

2. Pre-theoretical labels/folk classifications, help to organise initial intuitions, but may not mesh with groupings uncovered by theoretical (or empirical) investigation. (Cf. the intuitive notion(s) of ‘literal meaning’, Recanati 2004).

3. Understandingfigures of speech Guy: 3 questions about metaphor: [could clearly ask them of all our figures] 1. What is the output? 2. How is the output delivered? What is/are the mechanism(s) involved? 3. What is the input to the mechanisms?

4. Output question (for metaphor): • Proposition/cognitivist theorists: Grice, Searle, Stern, Wearing, Bezuidenhout, Sperber & Wilson, Glucksberg, …. • Non-cognitivist/‘image’ theorists: Davidson, Rorty, Lepore & Stone, Mitch Green, Schiffer, Liz Camp(?) …

5. Must it be one or the other? • Why can’t there be both some conceptual/propositional component and some non-conceptual (imagistic, affective, experiential) component? • Because of some notion of parsimony? (Mitch yesterday in his answer to Anne) • Perhaps all the language uses we pre-theoretically call metaphors (natural class??) don’t work exactly the same way. • Perhaps all (potentially) have a propositional component and all (potentially) have an imagistic/affective component. Different weightings in different cases.

6. Some examples: [none fully conventionalised / none highly poetic] 1. My job is a jail. 2. You wouldn’t want to annoy my granny. She’s a real paint-remover. 3. Memory is a crazy woman that hoards coloured rags and throws away food. (Austin O’Malley) 4. Depression, in Karla’s experience, was a dull, inert thing – a toad that squatted wetly on your head until it finally gathered the energy to slither off. The unhappiness she had been living with for the last ten days was a quite different creature. It was frantic and aggressive. It had fists and fangs and hobnailed boots. It didn’t sit, it assailed. It hurt her. In the mornings, it slapped her so hard in the face that she reeled as she walked to the bathroom. (Zoe Heller: The Believers p.263)

7. Two routes to metaphor understanding: • Route 1: • Explicature: His job is ajail* • Weak(ish) implicatures to do with the confining, monotonous, regimented nature of the job, the lack of autonomy/freedom of the worker, …. But also: Jail imagery (somatically marked?) • Pragmatically inferred propositional contents (communicated intended/speaker meant) • Activation/evocation of non-conceptual imagistic content (not communicatively intended, but may be otherwise intended by the speaker)

8. Two routes to metaphor understanding: Route 2: • Extended metaphors (but maybe not only): Depression, in Karla’s experience, was a dull, inert thing – a toadthat squatted wetly on your head until it finally gathered the energy to slither off. The unhappiness she had been living with for the last ten days was a quite different creature. It was frantic and aggressive. It had fists and fangs and hobnailed boots. It didn’t sit, it assailed ... • Literal meaning wins out against ad hoc concept formation. From the set of (literal) descriptions (and accompanying imagery evoked by the literal meaning of the words), we derive implications (weak implicatures) that can plausibly apply to the human experiences of depression and raw unhappiness.

9. Both components of output: • Activation/evocation of non-conceptual imagistic content (somatically marked), ‘showing how it felt’, what Karla’s experience was like … • But also: pragmatically inferred propositional contents (no explicature, but an array of weak implicatures, creating an ‘impression’).

10. Two kinds or modes of metaphor processing: • (1) A process of rapid on-line ad hocconcept formation which is continuous with the kind of context-sensitive pragmatic adjustments to encoded lexical meaning that are made in comprehending a variety of other loose and/or non-literal language uses; • (2) A process in which the literal meaning of metaphorically used language and the imagery it evokes is maintained (framed or metarepresented), and subjected to slower, more reflective interpretive inferences that separate out implications that are plausibly speaker-meant.

11. Propositional and imagistic components are both present across the full range of metaphors, irrespective of which of the two processing modes is employed, but there are differences in their relative weightings. Encompasses all of: • Davidson: Words used metaphorically mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation mean, and nothing more. • Mitch Green: ‘Much verbal metaphor gains it power from imagery; such images are often somatically marked.’ • Sperber & Wilson: Adjustment of word meaning [ad hoc concept formation] and (weak) implicatures

12. Hopelessly unparsimonious? 1. What are the mechanisms/processes required to account for understanding the full range of cases? • Perhaps two different types of figures: metaphors and allegories? (Would we dispense with the parsimony issue just be relabeling?!) 3. What domain are we measuring parsimony over? All mechanisms proposed are independently required for the processing/ understanding of various other kinds of language use: • metarepresentation of literal meaning • derivation of ad hoc concepts • inferring of implicatures • activation/evocation of imagery/affect