On Our Mind Salience, Context, and Figurative Language

Scholarly interest in figurative language has exploded in recent years,due in part to such important books as Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By, Ortony'sMetaphor and Thought, 2nd edition, and Gibbs' Poetics of Mind. One of theprevailing questions that engages linguists, psycholinguists, and philosophersof language is: how do we learn to produce and comprehend non-literal language?When faced with such statements as "all the world is a stage" or "my car is alemon," how do we get past the surface meaning and grasp the true meaning?Competing theories such as the "standard pragmatic model" (which emphasizes theliteral meanings of words) and the "direct access view" (which emphasizes theinfluence of context on word meanings) have only partially accounted for thevariety of language comprehension evoked in metaphor, irony, and jokes. RachelGiora has developed a novel and comprehensive theory, the Graded SalienceHypothesis, to explain figurative language comprehension. Giora contends thatthe salience of meanings has the primary role in language comprehension andproduction. In other words, highly familiar meanings for a given word willalways be activated, irrespective of the context in which we find theword.

Rachel Giora is Associate Professor of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University, Israel.