On understanding metaphor: the role of context

Abstract

Some metaphors, such as All jobs are jails, can be understood immediately and unambiguously, even when encountered in isolation. Others, such as All marriages are iceboxes, require an appropriate context if they are to be so understood. The paper explores the question of what constitutes a minimal appropriate context. It is proposed that any context that activates a property of the predicate term, for example, iceboxes, that is informative about the topic of the metaphor, for example, all marriages, will be sufficient to trigger immediate comprehension. To test this idea, the relative effectiveness of three types of contextual priming for metaphor comprehension was assessed: activation of the figurative sense of a metaphor ground, activation of the literal sense of that ground, and activation of the general semantic field of that ground. All three types of contexts led to immediate and automatic metaphor comprehension. These results suggest how context may be used to disambiguate both literal and nonliteral speech messages, and how both literal and non-literal comprehension mechanisms share important features, including the automatic deployment of general discourse-processing strategies.