Non-literal language processing: methodological issues about idioms and irony comprehension

Dr. Mercedes Marcilese- Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora

Figurative language has been traditionally considered to be derived from and more complex than literal language.

The standard view states that when speakers process a sentence, the first attempt is at extracting a literal meaning and only if this is found to be defective, the speaker proceeds to consider alternative interpretations related to metaphor, humor or irony (Grice 1975; Searle 1993). An alternative approach, according to which figurative language uses the same linguistic and pragmatic resources than literal language, also has been proposed. Studies in the fields of cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics suggest that metaphor is not merely a figure of speech, but is a specific mental mapping that influences the way human beings think, reason, and imagine in everyday life (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Lakoff 1993; Glucksberg 2001, 2003). However, despite the fact that the use of non-literal language is really widespread between adult speakers, there are also special populations that can deal with literal meanings but exhibit moderate or severe difficulties for the comprehension of figurative expressions. Evidence of this kind of dissociation is compatible with the idea that literal and non-literal meanings are processed differently, at least in some level. Findings of recent neuroimaging research suggest that the processing of literal, metaphoric and non-meaningful sentences relied on distinct neural mechanisms (Stringaris et al 2007). This talk aims at discussing topics related to the psycholinguistic processing of non-literal expressions such as idioms and ironic utterances on the base of Brazilian Portuguese data (Barreto 2017; Barreto, Marcilese and Avelar 2018; Avelar 2018;

Nonato, in prep.).