Wow! eBook
Creativity and Convention: The pragmatics of everyday figurative speech: 156 156th Edition
Author(s): Rosa E. Vega Moreno (Author)
- Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co
- Publication Date: 15 Aug. 2007
- Edition: 156th
- Language: English
- Print length: 264 pages
- ISBN-10: 9027253994
- ISBN-13: 9789027253996
Book Description
This book offers a pragmatic account of the interpretation of everyday metaphorical and idiomatic expressions. Using the framework of Relevance Theory, it reanalyses the results of recent experimental research on figurative utterances and provides a novel account of the interplay of creativity and convention in figurative interpretation, showing how features ‘emerge’ during metaphor comprehension and how literal meaning contributes to idiom comprehension. The central claim is that the mind is rather selective when processing information, and that in the pragmatic interpretation of both literal and figurative utterances, this selectivity often results in the creation of new (‘ad hoc’) concepts or the standardization of pragmatic routines. With this approach, the comprehension of metaphors and idioms requires no special pragmatic principles or procedures not required for the interpretation of ordinary literal utterances, but follows from an automatic tendency towards selective processing which is itself a by-product of Sperber and Wilson’s Cognitive Principle of Relevance.
Editorial Reviews
Review
By bringing together ideas from relevance-theoretic pragmatics and empirical results from a wide range of psycholinguistic experiments, this study of metaphor and idiom achieves a unique and illuminating synthesis. Of particular interest is a new and original explanation of how so-called ’emergent properties’ can be recovered in the process of on-line inferential comprehension. This book is a significant contribution to work on metaphor, creative cognition more generally, and cognitive pragmatics. — Robyn Carston, University College London
This book is a major step forward in our understanding of the interplay between creativity and convention in utterance interpretation, and in the interpretation of metaphor and idiom in particular. Using the pragmatic framework of relevance theory, and drawing on a wide range of experimental results from psycholinguistics, it is the first serious and sustained attempt to show that metaphor and idiom do not require special interpretive mechanisms, but are understood in the same way as ordinary, literal utterances. It is an original and important contribution to the field, and deserves to be very widely read. — Deidre Wilson, University College London
Creativity and Convention is a valuable book for scholars interested in pragmatic processes of understanding figurative speech and sharing cognitive pragmatic presumptions. […] Vega Moreno’s ambitious book is an inspiring and absorbing reading. — Jörg Kost, University of Cologne, Germany, on Linguist List 20.2342
