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Taking stock of an idiom’s background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account

This paper begins by presenting the theoretical background of, and the accompanying psycholinguistic findings on, idiom processing. The paper then widens its lens by comparing the idiom processing literature to that of metaphor and irony. We do so partly to better understand the idiom superiority ef...

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Autores principales: Noveck, Ira A., Griffen, Nicholas, Mazzarella, Diana
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10500192/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37720656
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1117847
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author Noveck, Ira A.
Griffen, Nicholas
Mazzarella, Diana
author_facet Noveck, Ira A.
Griffen, Nicholas
Mazzarella, Diana
author_sort Noveck, Ira A.
collection PubMed
description This paper begins by presenting the theoretical background of, and the accompanying psycholinguistic findings on, idiom processing. The paper then widens its lens by comparing the idiom processing literature to that of metaphor and irony. We do so partly to better understand the idiom superiority effect, according to which idiomatic sentences (unlike metaphoric and ironic ones) are generally processed faster than their literal controls; part of our motivation is to reconcile the differences between idiom processing, on the one hand, and metaphor and irony processing on the other. This ultimately leads us to Relevance Theory (RT), which has provided original insights into the processing of figurative language generally, but especially with respect to metaphor and irony. RT has paid less attention to idiomatic expressions (such as break the ice, fan the flames, or spill the beans), where one finds a single RT account that likens idioms to conventional metaphors. Through our overview, we ultimately arrive at an alternative RT account of idioms: We argue that idioms include a procedural meaning that takes into account relevant presuppositional information. For example, an idiomatic string such as break the ice not only asserts initiate social contact, it prompts the recovery of background assumptions such as there exists a social distance that calls for relief. This leads us (a) to apply linguistic-intuition tests of our presuppositional hypothesis, and; (b) to describe the paradigm and results from a pilot experiment. Both provide support for our claims. In doing so, we provide an original explanation for the idiom superiority effect.
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spelling pubmed-105001922023-09-15 Taking stock of an idiom’s background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account Noveck, Ira A. Griffen, Nicholas Mazzarella, Diana Front Psychol Psychology This paper begins by presenting the theoretical background of, and the accompanying psycholinguistic findings on, idiom processing. The paper then widens its lens by comparing the idiom processing literature to that of metaphor and irony. We do so partly to better understand the idiom superiority effect, according to which idiomatic sentences (unlike metaphoric and ironic ones) are generally processed faster than their literal controls; part of our motivation is to reconcile the differences between idiom processing, on the one hand, and metaphor and irony processing on the other. This ultimately leads us to Relevance Theory (RT), which has provided original insights into the processing of figurative language generally, but especially with respect to metaphor and irony. RT has paid less attention to idiomatic expressions (such as break the ice, fan the flames, or spill the beans), where one finds a single RT account that likens idioms to conventional metaphors. Through our overview, we ultimately arrive at an alternative RT account of idioms: We argue that idioms include a procedural meaning that takes into account relevant presuppositional information. For example, an idiomatic string such as break the ice not only asserts initiate social contact, it prompts the recovery of background assumptions such as there exists a social distance that calls for relief. This leads us (a) to apply linguistic-intuition tests of our presuppositional hypothesis, and; (b) to describe the paradigm and results from a pilot experiment. Both provide support for our claims. In doing so, we provide an original explanation for the idiom superiority effect. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-08-31 /pmc/articles/PMC10500192/ /pubmed/37720656 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1117847 Text en Copyright © 2023 Noveck, Griffen and Mazzarella. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Noveck, Ira A.
Griffen, Nicholas
Mazzarella, Diana
Taking stock of an idiom’s background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account
title Taking stock of an idiom’s background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account
title_full Taking stock of an idiom’s background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account
title_fullStr Taking stock of an idiom’s background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account
title_full_unstemmed Taking stock of an idiom’s background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account
title_short Taking stock of an idiom’s background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account
title_sort taking stock of an idiom’s background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10500192/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37720656
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1117847
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