Metaphor and mental shortcuts

Pragmatics and Cognition 28 (2):299-320 (2021)
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Abstract

Cognitive-pragmatic approaches to how metaphors are understood view the activation of perceptual or motor effects as inferred. Crucially, inferences elicit conceptual representations, e.g. in the form of implicatures, and/or mental simulations, e.g. in the form of imagery, memory, an impression and other private elements. Emotional effects, being non-conceptual, must be left out of this picture. But evidence in neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics has shown that metaphors activate brain regions linked to emotions, and that in L2, in the absence of fully-propositional meaning, metaphors yield meaningful interpretations by evoking imagery, impressions, emotions. Drawing on relevance-theoretic views, we would like to argue that metaphors are processed in not entirely propositional terms. Subjective experience heuristics allows making rapid responses by absorbing emotions, imagery, impressions, into the interpretation process, an ability which outweighs standard inferential reasoning processes. Such a position is likely to apply to non-metaphorical language, too and thus pervade linguistic processing in general.

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edition Ifantidou, Elly; Piata, Anna (2021) "Metaphor and mental shortcuts : The role of non-propositional effects". Pragmatics Cognition 28(2):299-320

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The visibility of speech.Stefana Garello - 2023 - Pragmatics and Cognition 30 (2):353-376.

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References found in this work

Relevance.D. Sperber & Deirdre Wilson - 1986 - Communication and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal 2.
Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition.Leonard Talmy - 1988 - Cognitive Science 12 (1):49-100.

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