Pragmatics of Figurative Language

Günümüzde daha pek çok çalışmayı gerektiren dilbilim ve psikoloji alanına giren sorunlar, dil edinimi ile ilgili çalışmalardan gelecek verilerle aydınlanma bulmakta ve ortaya çıkan bilgi ise bir takım soruları beraberinde getirmektedir. Kavram mı yoksa sözcük mü önce edinilir? Dil gelişimi ile birlikte öğrenilen yeni kavramların zihinde örgütlenmesi, nasıl bir düzeni takip eder? Bu soruları merkezinde bulunduran Öntür Kuramı, ulamın dereceli bir içyapısı olduğunu öne sürerek ulam öğelerinin, bulunduğu ulamı en iyi temsil eden öğeler etrafında odaklandığını savunmaktadır. Dereceli bir üyelik söz konusu olunca, zihinden çağrılma ve kavranma zorluğu üzerinde kavramın öntürlüğü etkili olmaktadır. İşte bu çalışma, deyimlerin bileşen adlarının öntürlüğü ve deyimin anlamlandırılması arasında bir koşutluğun olup olmadığını sorgulamaktadır. Araştırma grubu, anasınıfı, 3. sınıf, 5. sınıf ve 8. sınıflardan çocukları kapsamakta olup ilk uygulamada BEDEN BÖLÜMÜ üst ulamına ait kavramların bu yaşlara göre öntürlük değerleri sormaca yöntemiyle belirlenmiştir. Ortaya çıkan verilerden yola çıkarak seçilen kavram adlarını bileşeni olarak bulunduran ad + eylem yapısındaki deyimler, ad bileşeninin öntürlüğüne göre derecelendirilmiş ve her biri bir öykünün sonuç tümcesi olarak verilmiştir. Deyimlerin ya değişmeceli ya da gerçek anlamlarını yansıtan ya da konu dışı olan resimler hazırlanarak, bir kavrama testi oluşturulmuştur. Çocuk katılımcılar, öyküleri dinleyip sonundaki deyimi duydukları anda, öyküden anladıklarına dayalı olarak resimlerden birisini seçmişlerdir. Verilen yanıtların doğruluğu ve tepki süresi dikkate alınarak, deyimlerin anlamlandırılmasında bir öntürlük etkisi olup olmadığına yönelik çözümleme yapılmıştır. Anasınıfı grubu, ağırlıklı olarak gerçek anlamı seçmiş olup, diğer gruplarda ise ilerleyen yaşla birlikte değişmeceli anlama bir yönelim gözlenmiştir. Deyimlerin anlamlandırılmasında öntürlük etkisinden bahsetmeyi mümkün kılan bu bulgular, deyimlerin kalıplaşmış ve tek parça sözcükler olduğunu dolayısıyla bileşen sözcüklerin deyimin değişmeceli anlamı üzerinde bir etkisi olmadığını öne süren varsayımlara karşıt veri niteliğindedir. Diğer bir deyişle, deyimlerin anlamlandırılmasında, değişmeceli anlama erişildiği durumda bile gerçek anlama bir şekilde erişim sağlandığına dair, alanda yaygın çalışılmış tanınırlık ve saydamlık kriterlerinden farklı olarak, öntürlük kriteriyle kanıt sunulmuştur.

Hyperbole is traditionally understood as exaggeration. I argue instead that the point of hyperbole is emphasis. By overstating that things are greater (lesser) than expected, hoped, or desired, we shift the salience of the target property, thus making it more emphatic. This enables to express surprise or other relevant affect in reaction to how much, or how little, our expectations have been either exceeded or thwarted. This purpose is well suited to hyperbolic expression. This is because hyperbole naturally draws a contrast between how things are and how they were expected to be, exaggerating the gap between them. I conclude by considering the characteristics of hyperbolic figures where hyperbole mixes with other figures of speech.

This article explores the correlations between linguistic figurative features and their corresponding conceptual representations, by considering their respective continuities and discontinuities in language shift. I compare the figurative encoding of emotions in Kriol, a creole of northern Australia, with those of Dalabon, one of the languages replaced by this creole, with a particular focus on evidence from metaphorical gestures. The conclusions are three-fold. Firstly, the prominent figurative association between the body and the emotions observed in Dalabon is, overall, not matched in Kriol. Secondly, although this association is not prominent in Kriol, it is not entirely absent. It surfaces where speakers are less constrained by linguistic conventions: in non-conventionalized tropes, and gestures in particular. Indeed, some of the verbal emotion metaphors that have disappeared with language shift are preserved as gestural metaphors. Thus, Kriol speakers endorse the conceptual association between emotions and the body, in spite of the lower linguistic incidence of this association. The third conclusion is that therefore, in language shift, conceptual figurative representations and linguistic figurative representations are independent of each other. The former can persist when the latter largely disappear. Conversely, the fact that speakers endorse a certain type of conceptual representation does not entail that they will use corresponding linguistic forms in the new language. The transfer of linguistic figurative representations seems to depend, instead, upon purely linguistic parameters.

ATMOSPHERE 10 explores Fabrications. Fabrications implicate diverse artifacts and modes of making, together with the places, practices, contingencies and intentions that enable and contextualize making. In other words, this symposium will examine not simply what, how and why we make, but sites and situations of making. The aim is to explore how cultural and environmental circumstances become meaningful catalysts of design, building, teaching and research. This theme encompasses manifold concerns beyond the digital: complexities of urban and social fabrics; intricacies of environmental skins; potentials of building sites and workshops; as well as the stories and arguments through which we craft shared understandings of our fabricated world.

Abstracts due Nov 1, Symposium Feb 1-3, 2018 University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

Keynote Speakers include: Brian MacKay-Lyons & Philip Beesley
http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/architecture/atmosphere/2018/brian-mackay-lyons.html
http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/architecture/atmosphere/2018/philip-beesley.html

Reproducibility, which belongs to key terms in phraseological studies, is the focal issue of the conference, which will aim at offering an insight into this quality from a phraseological perspective by trying to provide answers to the following questions: What does the term reproducibility – of which several definitions exist – really mean in phraseological studies? How can reproducible language units be detected and analysed in corpora? How should they be described in mono-and bilingual dictionaries? What is their importance from the translational point of view? How to view them from a didactic perspective? How to discuss them in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural context? The list is not exhaustive and all proposals related to the notions of fixedness and phraseology are most welcome. The conference is not limited to the main subject and proposals of section presentations and posters on other phraseological issues are also planned. Persons who would like to organize special topic section and/or workshops are encouraged to send their proposals (one has to send the section or workshop abstract, the name of the chairperson and the names of participants along with the titles of their presentations).

The paper represents the first attempt to examine Slovene paremiology as it is shown in the corpus of spoken Slovene (GOS) which is composed of 120 hours of recorded speech. Thirty seven units were found with the corpus research which included 300 most well-known paremiological units from the Slovene paremiological minimum. We describe the range of proverb variants, actualisations as well as transformations, and show examples of non-prototypical usage of proverbs. After analyzing the text introducers of the proverbs, we show how these can be used to detect new phraseological material in corpora. We also analyze the distribution of units in different types of discourse and discuss the place of paremiology among other sentential phrasemes.

Key words: corpus of spoken Slovene GOS, phraseology, paremiological minimum, paremiological unit, proverb

Prispevek predstavlja prvi poskus raziskave slovenske paremiologije v korpusu govorjene slovenščine GOS, ki obsega 120 ur posnetega govora. S korpusno raziskavo, v katero smo vključili 300 najbolj poznanih paremioloških enot iz slovenskega paremiološkega minimuma, smo našli 37 enot. Opisujemo razpon variant, prenovitev in transformacij pregovorov ter prikazujemo primere njihove neprototipne rabe. Po analizi uvajalnih sredstev pregovorov pokažemo, kako ta sredstva lahko uporabimo za odkrivanje novega frazeološkega gradiva v korpusih. Analiziramo tudi zastopanost enot v različnih tipih diskurzov in razmišljamo o mestu paremiologije med preostalimi stavčnimi frazemi.

Ključne besede: korpus govorjene slovenščine GOS, frazeologija, paremiološki minimum, paremiološka enota, pregovor

This paper investigates how individuals perceive hyperbole in victim statements. Despite being one of the most commonly used literary tropes, the comprehension and cognition of hyperbole has been largely ignored in the psycholinguistics literature, and despite detailed literature outlining the emotional behaviour of victims, the use of figurative language has been largely ignored in the forensics literature. In the present study, two experiments were undertaken. In Experiment 1, 32 participants were recruited from groups with forensic experience or training. Participants were presented with 16 victim statements; eight contained a number of hyperbolic phrases and eight contained non-hyperbolic counterparts. After reading each statement, participants were asked to answer questions that would quantify perceived credibility on accounts of belief, sympathy, victim-impact, and likeability. The results from Experiment 1 showed that hyperbolic speech made a significant negative impact on all four credibility measures. In Experiment 2, 32 jury-eligible individuals performed the same task. Results from this experiment demonstrated that the use of hyperbole made testimonies more believable and made the victim seem more impacted. Results are discussed in terms of the real-world implications of using hyperbolic language, and individual differences in the comprehension of, and reaction to, figurative statements.

The figurative use of double negations (not uninteresting, not unhappy) has been described by linguists and rhetoricians with regards to the rhetorical figure litotes. Both mitigation and strengthening have been proposed as aims of litotes (Horn, 1989; Krifka, 2007; van der Wouden, 1996). An analysis of the construction nicht un-adjective (not unadj.) on the basis of German corpora leads to a coherent system of pragmatic functions for this sort of double negations. The construction can function as denial, potential presumption denial, mitigation or understatement. Nevertheless, litotes exemplifies the indeterminate nature of figurative meaning” as suggested by Colston/Gibbs (2012: 259) in their dynamical systems approach. It is argued that a clear-cut line between literal and figurative meaning cannot be ascertained for these constructions. Still, contextual signals such as correction, associative particles or conventionalisation of use can help to identify different meanings as primary.

Abstract This paper investigates how individuals perceive hyperbole in victim statements. Despite being one of the most commonly used literary tropes, the comprehension and cognition of hyperbole has been largely ignored in the psycholinguistics literature, and despite detailed literature outlining the emotional behaviour of victims, the use of figurative language has been largely ignored in the forensics literature. In the present study, two experiments were undertaken. In Experiment 1, 32 participants were recruited from groups with forensic experience or training. Participants were presented with 16 victim statements; eight contained a number of hyperbolic phrases and eight contained non-hyperbolic counterparts. After reading each statement, participants were asked to answer questions that would quantify perceived credibility on accounts of belief, sympathy, victim-impact, and likeability. The results from Experiment 1 showed that hyperbolic speech made a significant negative impact on all four credibility measures. In Experiment 2, 32 jury-eligible individuals performed the same task. Results from this experiment demonstrated that the use of hyperbole made testimonies more believable and made the victim seem more impacted. Results are discussed in terms of the real-world implications of using hyperbolic language, and individual differences in the comprehension of, and reaction to, figurative statements.

This study investigates preschoolers' ability to understand and produce novel metonyms. We gave forty-seven children (aged 2;9-5;9) and twenty-seven adults one comprehension task and two elicitation tasks. The first elicitation task investigated their ability to use metonyms as referential shorthands, and the second their willingness to name animates metonymically on the basis of a salient property. Although children were outperformed by adults, even three-year-olds could understand and produce metonyms in certain circumstances. Our results suggest that young children may find it easier to produce a metonym than a more elaborate referential description in certain contexts, and that metonymy may serve as a useful strategy in referring to entities that lack a conventional label. However, metonymy comprehension appeared to decrease with age, with older children tending to choose literal interpretations of some metonyms. This could be a result of growing metalinguistic awareness, wh...

Abstract:Through  evaluation of the performative  power of imagination, the author tries  to connect  the wittgensteinian language games theory with hints derived from the Charity Principle (Davidson) and the Cooperation  Principle (Grice), in order to trace an hypothetical moral and pedagogical use of imagination aiming at a possible  transformation of creative, temporal and experimental dimensions of personal experience.