Nonliteral Interpretation Research Articles

How do linguistic illusions arise? Rational inference and good-enough processing as competing latent processes within individuals

ABSTRACT Non-literal interpretations of implausible sentences such as The mother gave the candle the daughter have been taken as evidence for a rational error-correction mechanism that reconstructs the intended utterance from the ill-formed input (…gave the daughter the candle). However, the good-enough processing framework offers an alternative explanation: readers sometimes miss problematic aspects of sentences because they are only processing them superficially, which leads to acceptability illusions. As a synthesis of these accounts, I propose that conscious rational inferences about errors on the one hand and good-enough processing on the other are competing latent processes that simultaneously occur within the same comprehender. In support of this view, I present data from a two-dimensional grammaticality/interpretability judgment task with different types of subtly ill-formed sentences. Both conscious rational inference and good-enough processing predict positive interpretability judgments for such sentences, but only good-enough processing also predicts positive grammaticality judgments. By fitting a lognormal race model jointly to judgments and response latencies, I show that conscious rational inference and good-enough processing, as well as purely grammar-driven processing, actively trade off with each other during reading. Furthermore, individual differences measures reveal that participant traits such as linguistic pedantry, interpretational charity, and analytic/intuitive cognitive styles contribute to variability in the processing patterns.

It is not what you say but how you say it: Evidence from Russian shows robust effects of the structural prior on noisy channel inferences.

Under the noisy-channel framework of language comprehension, comprehenders infer the speaker's intended meaning by integrating the perceived utterance with their knowledge of the language, the world, and the kinds of errors that can occur in communication. Previous research has shown that, when sentences are improbable under the meaning prior (implausible sentences), participants often interpret them nonliterally. The rate of nonliteral interpretation is higher when the errors that could have transformed the intended utterance into the perceived utterance are more likely. However, previous experiments on noisy channel processing mostly relied on implausible sentences, and it is unclear whether participants' nonliteral interpretations were evidence of noisy channel processing or the result of trying to conform to the experimenter's expectations in an experiment with nonsensical sentences. In the current study, we used the unique properties of Russian, an understudied language in the psycholinguistics literature, to test noisy-channel comprehension using only simple plausible sentences. The prior plausibility of sentences was tied only to their word order; subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences were more probable under the structural prior than object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences. In two experiments, we show that participants often interpret OVS sentences nonliterally, and the probability of nonliteral interpretations depended on the Levenshtein distance between the perceived sentence and the (potentially intended) SVO version of the sentence. The results show that the structural prior guides people's final interpretation, independent of the presence of semantic implausibility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Dłonie i motywy związane z rękami w kreatywnej reklamie wizualnej

Hands and Hand-Related Motifs in Creative Visual Advertising The author summarizes typical ways of using the motif of hands in advertising, then focuses on examples of creative advertising, i.e. a form of marketing that, as a rule, aims to attract attention by breaking the presentation schemes, surprising, and often also shocking the recipient. The following types of advertisements can be distinguished within this category: (1) advertisements based on transsemiotic delexicalization of phrases or expressions related to hands or activities performed with them; (2) advertisements ascribing to hands some extraordinary features or properties that conflict with common knowledge about the world and as such require a non-literal interpretation; (3) advertisements relying on the animalization or reification of hands; (4) advertisements featuring hand/palm/finger themes in unusual, drastic, or obscene situational contexts; (5) advertisements in which motifs related to hands are an element of intertextual play of meanings.

Development of nonliteral interpretations in typically developing Spanish speaking children: light verb constructions and figurative expressions

AbstractIn this paper we present a study about the typical development of the comprehension of expressions that exhibit an ambiguity between a literal and a nonliteral interpretation in Spanish, and whose most frequent use is nonliteral. Such expressions include light verb constructions (LVC) such as to make the bed and expressions in a metaphor‐hyperbole‐idiom continuum (MHI) such as to sleep with angels. We ran a forced‐choice experiment where children aged 3 to 9 (N = 143) heard an ambiguous expression and had to choose the correct picture on the face of three options: one target item and two distractors. There were two counterbalanced lists, so that each critical item would be present in either the literal or the nonliteral condition. We collected accuracy data as well as reaction times. We encountered different developmental trends for LVC than for MHI, observing a literalist stage in MHI which we did not observe in LVC.

Emojis as Pictures

I argue that emojis are essentially little pictures, rather than words, gestures, expressives, or diagrams. 🎁 means that the world looks like that, from some viewpoint. I flesh out a pictorial semantics in terms of geometric projection with abstraction and stylization. Since such a semantics delivers only very minimal contents I add an account of pragmatic enrichment, driven by coherence and non-literal interpretation. The apparent semantic distinction between emojis depicting entities (like 🚗) and those depicting facial expressions (like 😊) I analyze as a difference between truth-conditional and use-conditional pictorial content: 🚗 depicts what the world of evaluation looks like, while 😊 depicts what the utterance context looks like.

REVEALING THE CLASSIFICATION OF IDIOMS AND THE TRANSLATION STRATEGIES FROM ENGLISH INTO INDONESIAN IN “THE RECRUIT” SERIES MOVIE

All languages have idioms. Idioms define as phrases or chunks which are identified as fixed expressions with a non-literal interpretation. In addition to its non-literal interpretation, some strategies are provided in order to be successfully render the messages into a target language. Thus, this research focuses on revealing (1) the classification of idioms proposed by Glucksberg (2001) and (2) the translation strategies of the idioms proposed by Baker (2018) from English into Indonesian in a series movie entitled “The Recruit” with 8 episodes. To reach the objectives, qualitative descriptive method is applied. The results show that there are 37 idioms found in 8 episodes. The revealing consists of 7 non-compositional idioms, 21 compositional transparent idioms, 5 compositional opaque idioms, and 4 quasi-metaphorical idioms are found. Further, the translation strategies used by the subtitler to translate the idioms from English into Indonesian based on Baker (2018) reveal that two (2) data that are translated using the strategy to translate the English idioms into idioms in Indonesian and 30 data that are translated using the paraphrase strategy from English into Indonesian. Moreover, there are five (5) idioms that are translated literally.

Non-literal language processing is jointly supported by the language and theory of mind networks: Evidence from a novel meta-analytic fMRI approach

Going beyond the literal meaning of language is key to communicative success. However, the mechanisms that support non-literal inferences remain debated. Using a novel meta-analytic approach, we evaluate the contribution of linguistic, social-cognitive, and executive mechanisms to non-literal interpretation. We identified 74 fMRI experiments (n = 1,430 participants) from 2001 to 2021 that contrasted non-literal language comprehension with a literal control condition, spanning ten phenomena (e.g., metaphor, irony, indirect speech). Applying the activation likelihood estimation approach to the 825 activation peaks yielded six left-lateralized clusters. We then evaluated the locations of both the individual-study peaks and the clusters against probabilistic functional atlases (cf. anatomical locations, as is typically done) for three candidate brain networks—the language-selective network (Fedorenko, Behr, & Kanwisher, 2011), which supports language processing, the Theory of Mind (ToM) network (Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003), which supports social inferences, and the domain-general Multiple-Demand (MD) network (Duncan, 2010), which supports executive control. These atlases were created by overlaying individual activation maps of participants who performed robust and extensively validated ‘localizer’ tasks that selectively target each network in question (n = 806 for language; n = 198 for ToM; n = 691 for MD). We found that both the individual-study peaks and the ALE clusters fell primarily within the language network and the ToM network. These results suggest that non-literal processing is supported by both i) mechanisms that process literal linguistic meaning, and ii) mechanisms that support general social inference. They thus undermine a strong divide between literal and non-literal aspects of language and challenge the claim that non-literal processing requires additional executive resources.

Address inversion in southern Italian dialects

This article proposes a ‘topological’ reinterpretation of the extended nominal architecture in relation to southern Italo-Romance vocatives with and without allocuzione inversa (‘address inversion’, Renzi 1968), a phenomenon involving the ‘inverse’ lexical indexation of the speaker-addressee relationship (reg.It. Mangia, papà! ‘Eat up, little one!’, father to child). Topological Mapping Theory (Longobardi 2005; Martín & Hinzen 2014) posits a unified model of grammatical structure and nominal reference denotation in argumental constituents, where a hierarchy of referentiality (from predicativity to deixis) emerges through the expansion of the functional architecture. Contributing to a growing theoretical consensus favouring extra ‘vocative’ structure in the nominal left periphery, I argue that Italo-Romance vocatives with and without address inversion involve a part-whole expansion of structure, yielding a necessarily tripartite nominal architecture (VocP-DP-NP) in line with topological principles. The non-literal interpretation of N observed in the ‘lexical flip’ of address inversion vocatives is argued to be the surface manifestation of movement into VocP, a functional space whose internal articulation serves to construe the ostensive-deictic possibilities of an object-referring expression at the exophoric level.

No Grounds for Fictionalism

I argue that fictionalism about grounding is unmotivated, focusing on Naomi Thompson’s (2022) recent proposal on which the utility of the grounding fiction lies in its facilitating communication about what metaphysically explains what. I show that, despite its apparent dialectical kinship with other metaphysical debates in which fictionalism has a healthy tradition, the grounding debate is different in two key respects. Firstly, grounding talk is not indispensable, nor even particularly convenient as a means of communicating about metaphysical explanation. This undermines the revolutionary proposal. Secondly, talk of grounding primarily occurs within metaphysics, which means the usual options for motivating a non-literal interpretation are ineffective. This undermines the hermeneutic proposal.

Compositionality, Metaphor, and the Evolution of Language

One of the great unknowns in language evolution is the transition from unstructured sign combination to grammatical structure. This paper investigates the central — while hitherto overlooked — role of functor–argument metaphor. This type of metaphor pervades modern language, but is absent in animal communication. It arises from the semantic clash between the default meanings of terms. Functor–argument metaphor became logically possible in protolanguage once sufficient vocabulary and basic compositionality arose, allowing for novel combinations of terms. For example, the verb to hide, a functor, could be combined not only with a concrete, spatial entity like food as its argument, but also with an abstract, non-spatial one like anger. Through this clash, to hide is reinterpreted as a metaphorical action. Functor–argument metaphor requires the possibility of term combinability and the existence of compositionality. At the same time, it transcends compositionality, forcing a non-literal interpretation. We argue that functor–argument metaphor led the development of protolanguage into fully-fledged language in multiple ways. Not only did it expand expressiveness, but it drove the development of syntax including the conventionalization and fixation of word order, and the development of demonstratives. Thus, functor–argument metaphor fills in multiple gaps in the trajectory from a protolanguage, with only some terms and simple term combinations, to the elaborate grammatical structures of fully-fledged human languages.

Interpreting Tax Legislation: The Role of Purpose

This paper was delivered in abbreviated form at the January 1995 meeting of the American Association of Law Schools, Tax Section.Copyright © 1995 by Deborah A. Geier"Sex Illegal in Missouri? Perhaps." (I knew that would get your attention.) That was the headline of an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in November 1994. The article described a Missouri statute enacted the preceding August that, if read literally, outlaws all sex in Missouri. One of the legislators is quoted in the article as saying that "[n]o one is going to be prosecuted for having normal sex," a statement I don't dare touch.The connection that this newspaper article has with the topic I discuss here is that tax law has a rich history of nonliteral interpretation in order to avoid results that one person or another has considered to be inconsistent with the purpose of the statute as a whole. This tradition is illustrated by the common law doctrines variously named substance over form, sham transaction, step transaction, business purpose, and assignment of income. In other instances, however, we have an extremely form-conscious approach, such as the approach to bootstrap acquisitions in the Zenz v. Quinlivan context. How do we make sense of it all?Interest in statutory interpretation has been renewed over the last decade, probably prompted-at least in part-by the confluence of two events that have nothing to do with tax law: the elevation to the Supreme Court of Antonin Scalia (whose literal textualist approach to statutory language is now embedded in the Court's opinions) and the attention paid to literature theorists, the so-called deconstructionists, who seized upon the notion that language is indeterminate. All of a sudden language and its interpretation were once again center stage after a long hiatus during which the theory behind the language dominated academic discourse.

Scaligerana: la langue comme sujet

The article concentrates on the analysis of Scaligerana, which stood at the origins of the ana tradition, widely represented by works created in the 17th – 19th centuries. The author analyzes the process of creating the text, which is represented by two independent versions (Prima Scaligerana and Secunda Scaligerana), compiled by students and admirers of the philologist Joseph Justus Scaliger, as well as the occuring of the manuscripts, their veneration and the vicissitudes of its publication. The article explores the logic of presenting information about a scholar who appears to the reader as an interlocutor who shares his personal experience and philological research in a private conversation. It demonstrates that the increased interest in the language, etymologies, and interpretations of the “obscurities” is a distinctive feature and the leading plot line of Scaligerana. The article suggests that the reasons for the close attention to language are to be sought in the European linguistic “revolution” of the 16th century, the reasons for which lie in the radical revision of the symbol’s concept that occurred in the Protestant culture with its non-literal interpretation of transubstantiation. The deontologization of language in the absence of a norm, which was established in France only at the end of the 17th century, led to the popularization of the idea of language as the causes of things, which was evidenced by Scaligerana.

Mordechai Z. Cohen. The Rule of Peshat: Jewish Constructions of the Plain Sense of Scripture and Their Christian and Muslim Contexts, 900–1270.

Mordechai Z. Cohen. <i>The Rule of Peshat: Jewish Constructions of the Plain Sense of Scripture and Their Christian and Muslim Contexts, 900–1270</i>.

Early Christian Readings of Genesis One: Patristic Exegesis and Literal Interpretation

Early Christian Readings of Genesis One: Patristic Exegesis and Literal Interpretation

The effect of speaker age on the perception of ironic insults.

We investigated a cue that readers may use in determining whether a remark such as "You are so helpful!" is intended as a compliment or as an ironic insult. The cue was the age of the speaker. Remarks were preceded by a sentence that either invited a literal or ironic interpretation of the remark. Data were collected on the familiarity of the remark as an ironic statement, and the incongruity of the remark with the prior context. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate the intent of the speaker as to how ironic, mocking, polite, and funny they intended their remark to be. In Experiment 2, participants read the scenarios as their eye movements were tracked. The results showed that age of the speaker had an impact on first pass reading times when statements were not familiar as ironic statements. Our younger adult participants did not appear to immediately activate a nonliteral interpretation of an ambiguous remark made by an older adult unless they had evidence from past experience that the remark is often used as an insult. However, ratings of the ironic intent of the statements were unaffected by speaker age; the age of the speaker affects the ease of interpretation but not the final outcome. The results are consistent with constraint-based theories of sentence comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Internet and the Limping Truth

Constitutional doctrine protects false speech and even lies in certain circumstances. The doctrine also endorses non-literal interpretation of speech that can cause statements implying factual assertions to be treated as non-factual, non-actionable opinion. These doctrines limit the degree to which laws may counteract falsity. Historically publishers exercised discretion, through ex ante review, that limited the dissemination of false statements, including those that would have been protected speech had they been published. As the Internet has lowered the cost of disseminating expression, speech has been democratized radically. Many more people say many more things, many of them untrue. 47 U.S.C. Section 230(c)(1) provides that social media outlets are not publishers of user-generated content, thus immunizing such outlets from, for example, tort liability such as for defamation. Outlets' terms of use typically grant them discretion to decline to post or to remove content. These outlets thus exercise ex post the sort of discretion formerly exercised ex ante by traditional media outlets. Political dissatisfaction with the exercise of such discretion has led to calls to treat social media outlets either as state actors or common carriers. Neither option is desirable. Social media outlets do not satisfy the legal criteria for state action, and misguided claims that Section 230 gives them a subsidy provides no logical basis for treating them as state actors. Nor is common carrier treatment warranted. If the relevant market is publicly available expression, as critics seem to assert, then even the largest outlets have no plausible claim to market power. Normatively, to treat social media outlets as either state actors or common carriers would subject them to falsity-protecting constitutional rules and thus lead to a net increase in harmful conduct--lies, among other things. Public discourse would be better served by allowing media outlets to continue to refine their content moderation practices, as private speech outlets historically have done.

Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic

Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic

Un análisis de la reacción &lt;em&gt;me gusta&lt;/em&gt; en Facebook desde los estudios de la interacción

El artículo analiza el empleo del emoticono reactivo me gusta en la red social Facebook a partir de conceptos teóricos de la pragmática y el análisis de la conversación. Se describe el empleo de me gusta como una intervención reactiva cuya interpretación (literal, como valoración positiva de un contenido, o no literal) depende de las características de la interacción y de principios pragmáticos, en concreto, los conceptos de pertinencia condicional, respuesta preferida o no preferida, la búsqueda de relevancia y las características de los participantes y su relación dentro de la red social, los cuales permiten explicar el empleo y la interpretación literal o no literal del emoticono en interacción.

The impact of foreign accent on irony interpretation.

In modern multi-cultural societies, conversations between foreign speakers and native listeners have become very common. These exchanges often include the use of figurative language. The present study examines, for the first time, whether native listeners’ non-literal interpretation of discourse is influenced by indexical cues such as speaker accent. Native listeners were presented with ironic and literal Spanish stories uttered in a native or foreign accent (Spanish and British English accents, respectively). Two types of irony were considered: ironic criticism (frequently used) and ironic praise (less frequently used). Participants were asked to rate stories on their level of irony. Results showed an impact of foreign accent on natives’ non-literal interpretation. The effect was evident in the less frequent ironic constructions (ironic praise), with foreign accented utterances considered less ironic than native accented utterances. These findings revealed that native listeners’ figurative interpretation of ironic praise can change depending on indexical cues, with a reduction of pragmatic inferences in the case of foreign accent.

Strongly attenuating highly positive concepts

Abstract What are the constraints rendering stimuli, such as Alert he is not; He is not the most organized person around; Hospitality is not his best attribute; Do you really believe you are sophisticated? sarcastic by default? Recent findings (Filik, Howman, Ralph-Nearman, &amp; Giora, in press; Giora et al., 2005, 2013, 2015a, 2015b, in progress a) suggest that strongly attenuating a highly positive concept, e.g., alert, sophisticated, most organized, best attribute (associated here with hospitality), induces sarcastic interpretations by default. To be interpreted sarcastically by default, items should be construable as such in the absence of factors inviting sarcasm.1 They should, thus, be (i) novel, noncoded in the mental lexicon, (ii) potentially ambiguous between literal and nonliteral interpretations, so that a preference is allowed, and (iii) free of specific and biasing contextual information. Online and offline studies, collecting self-paced reading times, eye-tracking data during reading, sarcasm rating, and pleasure ratings, alongside corpus-based studies, further support this view.2