Understanding and Literal Meaning

Abstract

The debate on literal meaning in theories of natural language processing has focused on two main issues: (1) Are there conditions by which the literal meaning of a sentence can be appropriately identified?; and (2) Is there some evaluation of literal meaning during the interpretation of natural language utterances? My article, “Literal meaning and psychological theory,” (Gibbs, 1984) attempted to provide responses to these important questions from the perspective of contemporary psycholinguistic research. I argued that there is not a well-defined set of conditions for specifying the literal meaning of sentences in terms of compositional analysis and that the experimental evidence speaks negatively as to whether people must analyze the literal meanings of sentences as part of the process of understanding speakers’ utterances. From these observations, I suggested that the widely accepted distinctions between literal and metaphoric meanings, and between semantics and pragmatics, have little utility for psychological theories of meaning and language use. Dascal’s (1987) recent defense of literal meaning raises some questions for my thesis. Although Dascal agrees with my essential point that literal meaning should not be equated with compositional meaning, he alleges that the concept of literal meaning can be profitably redefined as the conventional interpretation for a sentence. Contrary to my earlier position, Dascal states that with this revised definition of literal meaning one can,easily see that some analysis of literal meaning plays a role, no matter how minor, in guiding understanders to the contextually appropriate interpretations of speakers’ messages. There are important implications for the resolution of the literal meaning debate. Virtually all theories of meaning in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, literary theory, and AI presuppose some, mostly implicit, view of what’s literal and what’s not. In this response to Dascal, I attempt to clarify