Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 457–486 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and implicated Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.* Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA

Abstract What role does literal meaning play in language comprehension? This question has been vigorously debated in research on figurative language understanding. The standard pragmatic view proposes that people must analyze the complete literal meaning of indirect and figurative utterances before pragmatic information is consulted to infer speakers’ nonliteral messages. Most of the psycholinguistic research shows, however, that given sufficient context people understand nonliteralmeanings without first analyzing the complete literal meaning of an expression (i.e., the direct access view). Several lines of research have recently attempted to demonstrate that people still analyze aspects of literal meaning when understanding metaphors, irony, idioms, and proverbs. I critically evaluate this new work and suggest that it does not contribute sufficient evidence against the direct access view. Nonetheless, I argue that other research suggests how people analyze aspects of what speakers say as part of inferring what speakers implicate. This conclusion has several implications for specifying the role of pragmatics in ordinary utterance interpretation. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. Keywords: Figurative language; Literal meaning; Conversational implicatures; Psycholinguistics

1. Introduction A significant issue that continues to draw the attention of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists concerns the role that literal meaning plays in language interpretation. Many utterances in both conversation and written texts appear to communicate meanings that vary in some way from what is literally said. Consider the following exchange between two college students: Steve: Are you going to the big party this weekend? Beth: Didn’t you hear that Bob is going to be there? * Tel.: +1-408-459-4630. E-mail address: [email protected] 0378-2166/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. PII: S0378-2166(01)00046-7

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Beth’s response does not provide a direct answer to Steve’s question, but conveys a possible reply if we assume that Steve knows how Beth feels about Bob being at the party (i.e., she dislikes her ex-boyfriend Bob and so would not even think about going to a party he attended). In this instance, Beth’s literal utterance underdetermines what she implied in context in the sense that Beth means what she says but also wants to communicate something more than what she said. Speakers in other situations say things they do not literally mean in any way, even if the literal meaning of what they say is sensible. For example, if John says to Peter My grandmother finally kicked the bucket, he does not wish to communicate that his grandmother struck her foot against a pail. Instead, John intends to communicate some nonliteral meaning, such as that his grandmother died, which appears on the surface to have little to do with what he literally said. In other cases, speakers’ literal utterances are anomalous. When Harry says to Chad that Cigarettes are time bombs, he does not literally imply that cigarettes explode unexpectedly, but rather he intends to communicate a metaphorical meaning, such as that cigarettes are similar in certain respects to time bombs (i.e., cigarettes are like time bombs in that smoking them will eventually, suddenly cause one serious harm). Each of these examples illustrates a problem for pragmatic theories of language understanding—how does one infer what speakers imply given what they literally say? There have been many proposals offered in cognitive science in response to this question (see Gibbs, 1994 for a review). I have been critical of theories that assume listeners/readers must first analyze the literal meanings of utterances before applying pragmatic information to derive what speakers implicate (i.e., the standard pragmatic model). As I have argued elsewhere (Gibbs, 1984, 1989, 1994), people often appear to directly understand what speakers intend to communicate when using figurative language without having to process the literal meanings of speakers’ utterances (i.e., the direct access model). In recent years, several researchers have criticized the direct access view and suggested that listeners still process the literal meanings of figurative utterances. My aim in this article is to briefly respond to these recent empirical findings. I criticize how some researchers have operationally defined ‘‘literal meaning’’ in their experiments and suggest that the direct access model should still be preferred over theories that assume literal meanings have priority over figurative interpretations. An important goal here is to clarify some of the misunderstandings that have arisen over my previous claims that people do not analyze the literal meanings of figurative expressions before deriving their indirect or nonliteral meanings. Nonetheless, I also argue, based on newer findings from my own lab, that people may possibly analyze something about what speakers say as part of figuring out what speakers implicate. This conclusion has several implications for both linguistic and psychological theories of utterance interpretation. Most notably, the empirical evidence firmly points to the intuitive possibility of a distinction between understanding what speakers say and implicate, even if there remains no credible evidence that people automatically analyze the non-pragmatic, literal meanings of utterances during ordinary language understanding.

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2. The standard pragmatic view The traditional view of how listeners understand speakers’ messages that depart from what speakers literally say comes from H. Paul Grice’s theory of conversational implicature (Grice, 1989). Grice argued that the inferences needed to understand Beth’s comment Didn’t you hear that Bob is going be there? or John’s remark Cigarettes are time bombs are derived from certain general principles or maxims of conversation that participants in talk-exchange are mutually expected to observe (Grice, 1975, 1989). Among these are the expectation that speakers are to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear in what they say. When an utterance appears to violate any of these maxims, as Beth and John appear to do, listeners are expected to derive an appropriate conversational implicature about what the speaker intended to communicate in context given the assumption that he or she is trying to be cooperative. For instance, understanding a metaphorical comment, such as Cigarettes are time bombs, requires that listeners must first analyze what is said literally, then recognize that the literal meaning (i.e., that cigarettes are literally bombs that are set to explode at a specific future time), or what the speaker says, is contextually inappropriate, and only then infer some meaning consistent with the context and the idea that the speaker must be acting cooperatively and rationally (i.e., smoking cigarettes can have devastating effects for a person at a later time). Understanding literal utterances doesn’t demand the extra step of figuring out how a speaker’s intended meaning differs from his or her literal statement. The standard pragmatic view suggests, then, that indirect and figurative language should always be more difficult to process than roughly equivalent literal speech. More generally, this traditional view assumes that understanding what speakers literally say requires accessing of semantic information, while understanding what speakers implicate in context demands pragmatic information that is more difficult to access than semantic knowledge.

3. The direct access view The results of many psycholinguistic experiments have shown the traditional, Gricean view to be incorrect as a psychological theory (see Gibbs, 1994; Glucksberg, 1998). Numerous reading-time and phrase classification studies demonstrate that listeners/readers can often understand the figurative interpretations of metaphors, irony/sarcasm, idioms, proverbs, and indirect speech acts without having to first analyze and reject their literal meanings when these expressions are seen in realistic social contexts. People can read figurative utterances (i.e, You’re a fine friend meaning ‘‘You’re a bad friend’’) as quickly as, sometimes even more quickly, than literal uses of the same expressions in different contexts, or equivalent non-figurative expressions. These experimental findings demonstrate that the traditional view of indirect and figurative language as always requiring additional cognitive effort to be understood has little psychological validity. An alternative view of figurative language use suggests that people can comprehend the intended meanings of many nonliteral utterances directly if these are seen

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in realistic social contexts (Gibbs, 1994). The direct access view simply claims that listeners need not automatically analyze the complete literal meanings of linguistic expressions before accessing pragmatic knowledge to figure out what speakers mean to communicate. The complete literal meaning of a linguistic expression is itself a difficult concept to define. Following Frege (1952), the literal meaning of any sentence is traditonally thought to be its compositional meaning (i.e., the combined meaning of the individual words apart from context). Under the direct access view, people can, given the right context, understand speakers’ communicative messages without having to first construct a compositional analysis for the utterance. At the same time, the idea of a complete literal meaning of any utterance implies a highly non-pragmatic analysis of what is said. For instance, under the standard pragmatic model, when a speaker utters a statement as simple as The door is open, she only literally says ‘‘There is a uniquely identifiable door somewhere in the universe and it is open.’’ Similarly, when a speaker utters Jane has three children, she only literally says ‘‘Jane has at least three children, but may have more than three’’ (Grice, 1975). In this sense, the complete literal meaning of any utterance is its compositional meaning apart from enriched pragmatic knowledge (i.e., people’s background knowledge about the world and the local context). The direct access view does not claim that listeners never access something about what the individual words mean (perhaps, but not necessarily, these words’ literal meanings) during processing of what speakers imply. Nor does the direct access view claim that people never take longer to process a figurative meaning than to understand a literal one (sometimes referred to as the ‘‘processing-equivalence hypothesis,’’ see Giora et al., 1998). People may sometimes take a good deal of time to process novel poetic metaphors, for example. Yet it is not at all clear that the additional time needed to understand some novel expression is necessarily due to a preliminary stage in which the non-pragmatic, literal meaning for an entire utterance is first analyzed and then rejected. Listeners may take longer to understand a novel expression because of the difficulty in integrating the figurative meaning with the context and not because listeners are first analyzing and then rejecting the expression’s literal meaning. Various empirical evidence supports this idea (Schaw, 1995; Shinjo and Myers, 1987). For this reason, we simply should not infer that the literal meaning for an entire phrase or expression must have been analyzed simply because people take longer to read novel instances of figurative language than to process either familiar figurative expressions or equivalent literal statements. I offer these cautionary remarks about the direct access model because scholars often argue that the direct access view can not be right given either differences in processing for familiar and unfamiliar instances of figurative language, or because of longer reading times for figurative language than for equivalent literal expressions (cf. Giora, 1995, 1997). Moreover, many critics of the direct access view attempt to empirically demonstrate that the literal meanings of words in, for instance, metaphor and irony, appear to be accessed. These scholars sometimes argue that sensitive, on-line methods are needed to examine if and when literal meanings are accessed during language interpretation. I agree with this point to a large degree. But all the direct access model posits is that people do not automatically analyze the

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complete context-free, or literal meanings, of entire utterances before deriving their figurative meanings. People may indeed analyze aspects of what words mean when understanding indirect and figurative language (Gibbs, 1994). Consider the research on lexical ambiguity resolution. Psycholinguists have for decades debated whether the multiple meanings of ambiguous words (e.g., bug in The computer scientist found a bug in his program) are all momentarily understood or only the contextually appropriate meaning is activated (see Simpson, 1994 for a review). Research from various on-line studies provide support for both the contextsensitive model of lexical access (Glucksberg et al., 1986; Vu et al., 1998), in which only the contextually appropriate meaning is activated, and context-insensitive views (Swinney, 1979; Burgess et al., 1989), in which all the ambiguous word’s meanings are momentarily activated until contexts comes in to disambiguate the word’s meaning. Many psychologists now favor the position of highly frequent or dominant meanings always being immediately activated regardless of context (Tabossi and Zardon, 1993). Some work shows that processing polysemous words, unlike ambiguous words, results in the continued activation of inappropriate sense for some time after the critical word has been heard (Williams, 1992). But virtually all theories posit that the contextually appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word is determined within a short period of time (several hundred milliseconds at most). Thus, even theorists espousing a purely modular view of lexical ambiguity resolution do not argue that people carry the literal meanings of words till they get to the end of linguistic statements before pragmatic information, including context, is accessed to infer speakers’ contextually appropriate messages. In this way, the research on lexical ambiguity resolution does not directly bear on the specific claims of the direct access view of figurative language interpretation. Another way of putting this is that even if individual word meanings are momentarily activated regardless of context, this should not be understood as implying that the complete literal meanings of entire sentences are analyzed before speakers’ intended meanings are recognized.

4. Literal meanings in recent psycholinguistic findings Several studies have been published in recent years that attempt to illustrate the importance of literal meaning in figurative language understanding. This work shows that some activation of individual ‘‘word meaning’’ takes place in figurative language understanding. But scholars then erroneously argue that this evidence indicates something about ‘‘literal meaning.’’ As I demonstrated in considerable detail earlier (Gibbs, 1994, chapter 2), it is not clear what it means to say that a word or expression has a literal meaning. The concept of ‘‘literal’’ is quite complex, and people appear to have at least five, if not more, versions of literality (Gibbs et al., 1993). As noted above, most views of literal meaning assume that it refers to something about what entire sentences mean apart from context and enriched pragmatics. Several of the recent studies conflate aspects of literal and figurative meaning. For instance, one study examined irony comprehension by asking people to read statements that could have either literal or ironic meaning depending on the context

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(Giora et al., 1998). Consider the ironic and literal meaning of the statement you are just in time in the following contexts: Anna was a great student, but she was absent-minded. One day when I was well through my lecture, she suddenly showed up in the classroom. I said to her, ‘‘You are just in time’’. (ironic statement) Anna was a great student and very responsible. One day she called to tell me she did not know when she would enter the classroom. However, just as I was starting, she entered the classroom. I said to her ‘‘You are just in time.’’ (literal statement) Participants read these stories one line at a time on a computer screen. The results showed that people took more time to read the final statements in ironic contexts than when these same expressions were seen in literal contexts. This finding is consistent with the standard pragmatic model, and contrary to the findings reported by Gibbs (1986a) where people actually took less time to read ironies than literal uses of the same expressions. A closer examination of at least a few of the contexts used in each study suggests one possible explanation for these discrepant findings. Consider one short story context from the Gibbs (1986b) studies: Gus just graduated from high school and he didn’t know what to do with his life. One day he saw an ad about the Navy. It said that the Navy was not just a job, but an adventure. So Gus joined. Soon he was aboard a ship doing all sorts of boring things. One day as he was peeling potatoes, he said to his buddy, ‘‘This sure is an exciting life’’. The reason why people might find the ironic remark This sure is an exciting life as easy to process as when this same sentence was seen in a literal context (e.g., where the speaker said something truthful about the exciting life he was leading) is because the context itself sets up an ironic situation through the contrast between what Gus expected when he joined the Navy and the reality of it being rather boring. Because people conceive of many situations ironically (Gibbs, 1994; Lucariello, 1994), they can subsequently understand someone’s ironic, or sarcastic, comment without having to engage in the additional computation that may be required when ironic remarks are seen in situations that are inherently less ironic. This possibility suggests, not surprisingly, that various contextual factors influence linguistic processing so it might not be the case that irony always takes longer to process than literal language (see Katz and Lee, 1993; Katz and Pexman, 1997 for studies on the influence of different discourse factors in irony comprehension and Giora, 1995 for a discussion of irony versus literal processing in terms of discourse coherence). People may still need to draw complex inferences when understanding some ironic statements, but part of these inferences can occur before one actually encounters an ironic utterance. Once again, if the context is sufficient, people may not necessarily analyze the complete literal meaning of a sarcastic comment before deriving its intended figurative meaning. The most vigorous defense of the standard pragmatic model is seen in Temple and Honeck’s (1999) work on proverb understanding. Temple and Honeck (1999) dispute, on methodological grounds, the findings of an earlier study on proverb understanding showing that people are faster to process proverbs when they are

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used figuratively than when they are intended to have literal meaning (Kemper, 1981), which is clearly evidence in favor of the direct access view. They argue that most studies, like Kemper’s, investigating the empirical claims of the standard pragmatic model (which Temple and Honeck refer to as the ‘‘multistage’’ model of figurative processing) focus on familiar, conventional expressions such as indirect requests and idioms. As I have suggested earlier (Gibbs, 1989, 1994), this characterization of the psycholinguistic literature is inaccurate. Several studies have examined comprehension of novel figurative language, including novel metaphors and sarcastic indirect requests, and shown that these novel forms can be processed as quickly as equivalent literal speech. Again, these findings do not imply that people must always process novel figurative language as quickly as literal language. Yet the fact that various works along this line have been reported speaks against the claim that the direct access view only applies to familiar figurative language. Temple and Honeck criticize the direct access view by arguing ‘‘In our view, the traditional problem is that the direct access position places essentially all the basis for understanding on the context and none whatsoever on the proverb. That is, people are presumed to already have an understanding of some topic, with the proverb serving as a mere redundant confirmation of it’’ (1999: 47). As I argue above, this characterization of the direct access position makes little sense. People clearly do something with the words they hear and the fact that a listener hears a proverb as opposed to some other statement must matter in the ongoing interaction between speakers and listeners or writers and readers. Once more, the direct access position only claims that listeners do not automatically process the complete non-pragmatic, literal meanings of figurative expressions before bringing in pragmatic information to infer speakers’ intended messages. The social context that exists at any one moment (i.e., the speaker’s and listener’s common ground) is rarely constraining enough so that listeners know with certainty what speakers will say and intend to mean before they utter their words. Temple and Honeck’s hypothesis for their multistage view of proverb understanding is called the ‘‘conceptual base theory’’ (Honeck, 1997). This theory, like to the standard pragmatic model, assumes that a complete construction of a proverb’s literal meaning is an essential step in a theory of how proverbs are understood. Literal meaning under Temple and Honeck’s view is ‘‘based on the different values of the words and their syntactic combination, activated background knowledge, lexicalized phrasal constituents, and their conventional usages’’ (1999: 48). It is unclear what aspects of ‘‘activated background knowledge’’ come into play in this view of literal meaning. Yet it seems evident that the literal meaning analyzed by listeners refers to a proverb’s complete, nonfigurative meaning, determined apart from the context in which it appears. To test their hypothesis, Temple and Honeck asked participants to read two twosentence contexts. In the first condition, one context was relevant to the literal meaning of a proverb and the other was literally irrelevant to the proverb (i.e., the literal condition). In the second condition, one context was relevant to the figurative meaning of a proverb and the other was figuratively irrelevant to the proverb (i.e., the figurative condition). Participants in a first study either saw all literal or all figurative

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contexts. For both conditions, after reading both contexts, participants read a novel proverb (e.g., The cow gives good milk but kicks over the pail), and then quickly judged which context the expression was most meaningfully related to. For both conditions, then, the literally relevant or figuratively relevant contexts were the ones that participants were expected to select. The latencies to make these choices were measured. The data showed that reaction-times were longer in the figurative condition than in the literal one, a finding that is taken as supporting the multi-stage view of proverb comprehension. Follow-up studies essentially replicated this main finding. The primary difficulty with these studies is that the choice reaction-time task doesn’t accurately measure people’s immediate comprehension of proverbs in context. Asking participants to first read a proverb and then make a judgment between two contexts conflates the process of comprehension with the process of judging the appropriateness of a proverb against two different situations. This metalinguistic task is different from what people ordinarily do in everyday conversations or when reading. For instance, people hearing a linguistic statement don’t have to judge which of two different statements it relates to. Instead, people interpret a statement by inferring the speaker’s communicative intention given the context at hand (i.e., the speaker and listener’s common ground). Psycholinguistic research has been increasingly critical of comprehension measures, such as Temple and Honeck’s choice RT task, that are not sensitive to immediate psychological processes. Temple and Honeck strongly claim, nonetheless, that the choice reaction-time method is somehow more sensitive than simple reading time measures. At the same time, the fact that there is a difference in choice RT to figurative and literal contexts does not imply that a proverb’s complete literal meaning was analyzed as part of people’s understanding of its nonliteral interpretations. Nor do the data directly imply that people used the literal meaning to infer the proverbs’ figurative interpretations (in the figurative condition). Temple and Honeck admit as much when they state ‘‘First, like Kemper’s (1981) study, this study has not directly shown that literal meaning was in fact used to construct nonliteral meaning. Rather, it was shown that it takes less time to understand that a proverb, such as The used key is always bright, is about keys, brightness, and a general key-using schema, than about frequently used instruments retaining their functional value’’ (1999: 67). This point is important because psycholinguistic theories of figurative language understanding have not detailed how the analysis of literal meaning may actually contribute to people’s understanding of speakers’ nonliteral messages. I question the method employed by Temple and Honeck (1999), and do not agree that their findings directly imply people analyze a proverb’s complete literal meaning before its nonliteral meaning is understood. Yet I will later suggest that aspects of what speakers pragmatically say when using novel proverbs, to take one example, may play some role in inferring what speakers implicate by their use of these expressions. The majority of recent studies examining the role that literal meaning plays in figurative language understanding employ on-line methodologies that are sensitive to rapid activations of meanings. These on-line studies are presumed to be better indicators of literal meaning activation than are more global measures of utterance comprehension, such as reading time and phrase classification techniques. Yet, I

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argue that these on-line studies only examine the immediate activation of individual word meaning and do not specifically assess the analysis of an utterance’s complete literal meaning during immediate language understanding. For instance, one research project examined comprehension of familiar and less familiar metaphorical expressions (Blasko and Connine, 1993). Participants in these experiments heard different sentences and made lexical decisions at various times to visually presented word strings. For example, as participants heard the sentence The belief that hard work is a ladder is common to this generation, they were visually presented a letter string immediately after hearing the word ladder. The letter string visually presented was related to some aspect of the sentence’s literal meaning (e.g., rungs), a letter string related to the sentence’s metaphoric meaning (e.g., advance), or a control word unrelated to the sentence (e.g., pastry). The results revealed that participants were equally fast in responding to the literal and metaphorical targets, which were both faster than the latencies to the controls. This was true both when participants made their lexical decisions immediately after hearing the critical word (e.g., ladder), and when the same decisions were made 300 ms after hearing the critical word. However, when participants made these same types of lexical decisions to literal and metaphorical targets having heard less familiar expressions, such as The thought that a good professor is an oasis was clung to by the entire class, only literal targets were primed immediately after hearing the critical word (e.g., oasis), while responses to the metaphorical targets were facilitated only 750 ms after the critical word. Again, this study examines different aspects of meaning (word vs. phrasal) when it compares response times to literal (word) and metaphoric (phrasal) targets. The literal target rung is a simple semantic associate of the word ladder, while the metaphoric target advance only relates to the general meaning of the entire expression. This makes it difficult to conclude anything about the time-course under which literal meanings of an entire sentence are activated compared to figurative meanings of these expressions (i.e., the hypotheses proposed by the standard pragmatic and the direct access models). Even if one wishes to reconceive of literal meaning as only relating to individual word meaning, this study does not allow one to compare activation of literal word meanings with figurative word meanings. Moreover, the words used as literal and metaphoric targets do not seem to reflect very distinctive literal and figurative meanings. The literal target rung, for instance, is related to the idea of advancing (i.e., the figurative target) given that climbing ladders, even literally speaking, is one kind advancing along some physical path. Many of the criticisms raised here apply to several of the other recent studies on literal meaning in figurative language understanding. For example, one study presented participants with tape-recorded sentences, such as After the excellent performance, the tennis player was... that could end with either a literal expression, such as in seventh position, or an idiomatic phrase, such as in seventh heaven (Cacciari and Tabossi, 1988). The idiomatic phrases were either highly familiar and predictable (e.g., people could predict that the word following in seventh was heaven) or less predictable. After hearing the last word in each sentence, the participants made a lexical decision about a visually presented target (i.e., they decided if the letter string

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presented was a word). These target words could be related to the last word in the sentence just heard in three different ways: to the literal meaning of the last word (e.g., saint), to the idiomatic sense of the entire sentence (e.g., happy), or unrelated (e.g., table). An analysis of the speeded lexical decisions indicated that when participants heard predictable idioms, they responded faster to the idiomatic targets than to the literal targets. But when idioms were less predictable, responses to the idiom targets were facilitated only after a 300 ms delay, suggesting that the idiomatic meanings took some time to be activated. Responses to literal targets were facilitated both immediately after hearing the last word of the sentence and also 300 ms later. These data imply that literal meanings seem to have some priority over figurative ones during comprehension of less predictable idioms and that the literal meanings of words remain active during idiom processing even if they are not relevant to the figurative interpretation of the entire idiom phrase. What light do these empirical findings shed on the debate between the standard pragmatic and direct access views? Cacciari and Tabossi (1988) propose a configuration model suggesting that people process an idiom literally until a key word has been heard (e.g., heaven). After that, the idiom is processed according to its conventional, figurative meaning. This model sits between the standard pragmatic and direct access views by not insisting that the complete literal meaning of a phrase be understood before its idiomatic interpretation is derived. Yet this model assumes that literal processing is the default mode by which idioms, similar to all language, are understood. I have two reactions to this proposal. First, the Cacciari and Tabossi study compared speeded responses to targets reflecting the meanings of individual words (i.e., literal targets) with responses to targets reflecting the figurative meaning of an entire idiomatic phrase (e.g., the idiom targets). But these targets reflect very different levels of meaning (i.e., word versus phrase) and so it remains unclear whether there are really distinct modes of literal and idiomatic processing that are not confabulated with word and sentence processing mechanisms. The fact that some aspects of word meaning are accessed immediately during idiom understanding is not surprising. Yet this study has not fairly tested whether compatible literal and figurative processes are ongoing at both the word and phrasal level. The second issue with this study is that the activation of a particular meaning (i.e., literal or idiomatic) is assumed to reflect the output of entirely different linguistic processes. The possibility remains that activation of different kinds of meaning (i.e., literal or idiomatic) may really reflect different types of meaning accessed by a single linguistic process. The fact that scholars label one kind of meaning as ‘‘literal’’ and another ‘‘idiomatic’’ doesn’t necessarily indicate that different processes operate (i.e., a literal processing mode and a idiomatic or figurative processing mode) to access these meanings (either in a serial or parallel manner). Furthermore, I again emphasize that none of the work discussed here attempts to define what is meant by the term ‘‘literal meaning’’ either at the word or complete sentence level. Another way of looking at this issue of equating different meanings with different processes is to again consider the experimental work on lexical ambiguity resolution.

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Consider the sentence The engine couldn’t stand the constant wear, containing the polysemous word stand. As several studies (Gibbs et al., 1995), and a quick look in the dictionary reveal, stand has multiple, related meanings, some of which might be viewed as literal (e.g., He stands at attention and others figurative (e.g., A one night stand). One could easily argue about whether it is best to consider physical senses of stand as literal, and nonphysical uses as figurative. I think this is a very difficult issue to resolve, as it calls into question the very definitions of ‘‘literal’’ and ‘‘figurative’’ (see Gibbs, 1994, chapter 2 for an extended discussion of this point). Yet even if one claims that a principled distinction exists between literal and figurative meanings, the activation of the contextually appropriate meaning(s) of stand in The engine couldn’t stand the constant wear could be a result of the same lexical access process that gives rise to the more literal or physical senses of stand as in He stands at attention. Thus, one does not have to posit completely different linguistic processes (i.e., literal vs. figurative) to activate different meanings. I suggest this comparison to the work on lexical ambiguity resolution because of the tendency among researchers to assume that different processes must underlie activation of different types of linguistic meaning. My suggestion is that scholars resist interpreting the findings of different on-line studies of sentence processing, including those looking at literal meaning in figurative language understanding, as necessarily demonstrating different linguistic processes. An important consequence of this idea is that differences in the activation of literal and figurative meanings should not be viewed as evidence for the primacy of literal processing in utterance interpretation. Another reason to question whether different linguistic meanings reflect different linguistic processes is the fact that there are numerous, perhaps many dozens of, types of meaning. For instance, there are many types of figurative meaning, including metaphoric, idiomatic, metonymic, ironic, satirical, proverbial, hyperbolic, oxymoronic, and so on (Gibbs, 1994). Scholars often assume within the context of a single set of studies that there are two processes at work during figurative language understanding, such as literal vs. idiomatic, literal vs. metaphoric, or literal vs. ironic. Yet, if there are numerous types of meaning, must there be dozens of types of linguistic processes all at work, or potentially at work, when language is understood? Psycholinguists have not addressed this question primarily because they focus too narrowly on only one kind of figurative meaning against a simple view of literal meaning. Finally, consider the findings of a similar set of studies looking at irony comprehension (Giora and Fein, 1999). These studies examined people’s understanding of familiar (e.g., Very funny) and less familiar (e.g., Thanks for your help) ironies in comparison to literal uses of the same expressions in appropriate contexts. Participants read stories ending with either literal or ironic remarks. After reading the final sentence, they were presented with a letter string and had to quickly respond whether that string was a meaningful word. For instance, after reading the statement Thanks for your help, they were presented with either an ironic test word (e.g., angry) or a literal test word (e.g., useful). These test words were presented either 150 ms or 1000 ms after participants read the final statements.

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The results showed that when people read less familiar ironies they responded faster to the literal test words than to the ironic test words in the 150 ms condition, but there were no differences in the lexical decision times to the literal and ironic test words after 1000 ms. In contrast, the literal and ironic test words were responded to equally fast after both 150 and 1000 ms when people read familiar ironies. This pattern of data suggests that when people read familiar ironies both literal and ironic meanings are quickly accessed, but only literal meanings are initially activated when people read less familiar ironic statements. Although Giora and Fein (1999) favor a salience-first processing model, as opposed to the standard pragmatic account, their results support the idea that salient meanings, of perhaps both words and sentences, are always accessed first. The problem with this study is identical to that seen in the experiments on idiom and metaphor comprehension. Literal test words relate to single words within the ironic statements, while the ironic test words only relate to the figurative meanings of the entire statements. Once again, the experiment incorrectly compares literal word meaning with figurative utterance meaning. At the same time, the ironic test words do not even specifically relate to what the final ironic remarks figuratively mean. Although the speaker of Thanks for your help might indeed be angry (in the ironic story context), it is not obvious that the word angry captures much about what the speaker figuratively means (e.g., that the addressee has not been very helpful). Moreover, the literal test word useful is to some degree related to the ironic meaning in the sense that within the story context the addressee was not being useful. It is not surprising, then, to see quicker responses to these literal test words in the 150 ms condition. My main point is that each of these on-line studies mistakenly assume, that there is only one kind of literal meaning (i.e., word meaning). These studies fail to distinguish between the literal meanings of words and the literal meanings of entire phrases or expressions. The fact that some aspects of word meanings are quickly activated, and consequently responded to faster than the figurative meanings of entire phrases is not at all unexpected (see Gibbs, 1984 for discussion of this possibility). These studies do not show that people combine word meanings to form literal meanings for an entire expression as an obligatory part of figurative language interpretation (i.e., the standard pragmatic model). For this reason, the results of these on-line studies do not directly bear on either the standard pragmatic or direct access views. It is still unclear whether the particular words used in the literal target conditions in the above studies really reflect something about literal meaning as distinct from figurative meaning. We might for the moment still reasonably adopt the position that some aspects of word meaning are processed during figurative language processing. Yet it is quite a stretch to conclude that language is processed in a literal manner until some specific, key word triggers a different kind of processing (e.g., figurative). It may be more accurate to suppose that different kinds of meaning are activated at different points in figurative language processing rather than to suppose that a completely different kind of processing mode kicks in, temporarily taking over the normal, default literal processing. One need not postulate different literal and figurative processing modes to account for any of the data obtained in these studies.

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Debates over literal meaning in understanding what speakers say and mean extend into empirical research in neuropsychology. Many studies have shown, for example, that patients with frontal-lobe damage have impaired understanding for ambiguous language (Pearce et al., 1995), conventional indirect speech acts (e.g., Can you pass the salt?) (McDonald and van Sommers, 1993), and sarcastic remarks in which the intended meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning (e.g., What a great football game) (McDonald, 1992; McDonald and Pearce, 1996). Other studies show that patients with right hemisphere damage have difficulty understanding metaphoric word meanings (Brownell et al., 1990), proverbs (Van Lancker, 1990), and humor (Bihrle et al., 1983). These studies generally demonstrate that patients interpret indirect, or figurative, language in terms of literal meanings and do not correctly infer speakers’ implicated, communicative messages. Some neuropsychologists interpret their findings as providing support for the standard pragmatic view. Thus, patients’ failure to correctly interpret nonliteral language suggests a deficit in the application of pragmatic knowledge to infer speakers’ intended meanings. For instance, one study asked frontal-lobe patients to interpret whether conversational remarks were sarcastic without any explicit information regarding the attitude of the speaker (McDonald and Pierce, 1996). The sarcasm was mainly apparent from the counterfactual nature of the remarks. Thus, participants were presented with the following exchange: Mark: What a great football game. Wayne: So you are glad I asked you. Each remark here could be meaningfully understood as a literal interpretation of what was said. This is the literally consistent condition, as the second statement was a literal response to the first. In the literally inconsistent condition, however, the second statement was taken from the alternative sentence pair to represent the antithesis of the expected response to the first statement. Participants in this condition saw the following example: Mark: What a great football game. Wayne: Sorry I made you come. Because the two statements are pragmatically contradictory, the only way in which they can be seen as meaningful is if one or another of the statements is interpreted to be the opposite of what it literally asserts (and thus a sarcastic comment). After hearing either of these conversational exchanges, participants were asked four questions: (a) Did Mark think the game was good? (b) Did Mark think the game was bad? (c) Is Wayne pleased that he asked Mark to the game? (d) Is Wayne sorry that he asked Mark to the game?

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For literally consistent items, answers to the literal meaning of each question was deemed correct. For the inconsistent items, there were several possible combinations of answers, depending on which of the statements was regarded as insincere. Thus, for the second exchange above, if the subject discerned sarcasm because he believed the first statement to be insincere, he would respond NYNY (i.e., No, Yes, No, Yes). If the second statement was processed as the insincere one he would answer YNYN. If the subject could not reconcile the contradictory nature of the interchange, the responses would reflect the literal interpretations of the meaning (YNNY), or some other combination representing a confused interpretation of the exchange. The results showed that frontal lobe patients were able to process literal meanings (e.g., their reasonable performance on the consistent items), but a significant proportion of them could not reconcile the inconsistent items in order to detect sarcasm. McDonald and Pierce (1996) argue that the fact that some of the frontal lobe patients failed the sarcasm task is consistent with the Gricean view that comprehension of sarcasm requires application of inferential processes in order to reinterpret literal meanings. I have no doubt that brain-damaged patients often misinterpret speakers’ communicative messages. The question is whether their apparent focus on the literal meanings of expressions reflects the operation of the standard pragmatic process where literal meaning is automatically processed first during nonliteral language understanding. For instance, the task in the McDonald and Pierce study actually required people to interpret the expression What a great football game literally as there was no particular reason to interpret it any other way. Only when participants read the second utterance in the literally inconsistent condition were they forced to reinterpret, perhaps, their understanding of the first expression. This kind of situation where people need to reinterpret some utterance certainly occurs in some cases. But this task does not really capture what ordinarily happens when people see sarcastic comments in contexts that may provide crucial clues to the speakers’ nonliteral meanings. If anything, then, McDonald and Pierce’s task looks at frontal-lobe patients’ fixedness of meaning rather than the priority of literal meaning in the on-line processing of sarcastic messages. Furthermore, trying to infer something about people’s rapid, unconscious processing of language from their conscious interpretations of meaning makes the mistake of conflating the products of understanding with the processes of understanding (Gibbs, 1994). The fact that people give different interpretations to different types of language does not necessarily imply that these meanings are understood via entirely different cognitive mechanisms. Different studies looking at brain processes in normal individuals suggests that literal meanings do not have priority when people interpret figurative language. For instance, Pynte et al. (1996) examined the time-course of literal and metaphorical processes in metaphor comprehension by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs). One advantage of measuring ERPs is that recording brain electrical activity when participants silently read sentences for comprehension minimizes any decision stage required in reading time experiments (i.e., where participants must push a button indicating their comprehension of each sentence read). One endogenous component

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of the ERP is the N400 wave, which is known to be a sensitive index of language processing, especially for word level processes. The ERPs were recorded when participants read short familiar metaphors (e.g., The fighters are lions), unfamiliar metaphors (e.g., These apprentices are lions), and literal control sentences (e.g., Those animals are lions). Participants read these sentences in isolation, and in relevant or irrelevant contexts. When people read the sentences in isolation, the terminal words of the metaphors elicited larger N400 components than did terminal words of literal sentences. Pynte et al. (1996) suggest that the N400 amplitude between metaphors and control sentences indicates that the incongruous, literal meaning of the metaphor has been accessed during metaphor comprehension. Analysis of the later ERP components between 600–1000 and 1000–1400 latency bands, which are sensitive to elaboration and integration processes, revealed no difference between metaphoric and literal sentences. However, in later experiments, when participants read the less and more familiar metaphors in relevant and irrelevants contexts, there were no difference in the N400 for the two types of metaphors in relevant contexts, suggesting, according to Pynte et al. (1996), that in relevant context literal meanings were short-cut and no longer accessed. Overall, the findings from these studies support the context-dependent view of metaphor comprehension in which direct access to the metaphoric meanings occur when the meaning is relevant to the preceding context (although the lack of a literal control condition is problematic in interpreting these results). This conclusion is essentially consistent with the direct access view in that people do not analyze the complete literal meanings of expressions as part of their understanding of what speakers intended to communicate. Nevertheless, these studies, like many of those in psycholinguistics, assume from the beginning without justification that there must be two linguistic processes at work: literal and metaphoric. The data collected here with ERPs are just as easily explained by the view that there is a single interpretive process that gives rise to various meanings during utterance interpretation. Although some of these meanings appear to be literal and others metaphoric, this does not mean that each arises from completely different cognitive mechanisms.

5. Falsifying the direct access view My main argument has been that recent research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics provides little support for the standard pragmatic view and is most consistent with the direct access view of figurative language understanding. The occasional findings that some figurative utterances may take longer to process than literal expressions is by itself insufficient to support the standard pragmatic model, or reject the direct access view. Similarly, showing that people access aspects of what might be referred to as the literal meanings of words in figurative statements also does not imply that the direct access view is wrong. Falsifying the direct access view requires some demonstration that the analysis of a sentence’s complete literal meaning is responsible for the extra time needed to comprehend figurative language.

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There are only two sets of studies that include both of these elements in experimental tests of the direct access view (Gibbs, 1983, 1986c). Participants in one set of these studies read stories that ended with sentences intended either as indirect requests or as literal questions (Gibbs, 1983). After reading each story, the participants were presented with a word string. Their task was to decide whether the word string constituted a meaningful English sentence. Presented below is an example of two stories followed by each of its possible target strings. Literal context Martin was talking with his psychiatrist. He was having many problems with relationships. He always seemed hostile to other people. Martin commented to the psychiatrist, ‘‘Everyone I meet I seem to alienate.’’ The shrink said, ‘‘Can’t you be friendly?’’ Literal: ‘‘Are you unable to be friendly?’’ Indirect: ‘‘Please be friendly to other people.’’ Indirect request context Mrs. Connor was watching her kids play in the backyard. One of the neighbor’s children had come over to play. But Mrs. Connor’s son refused to share his toys. This made Mrs. Connor upset. She angrily walked outside and said in a stern voice to her son, ‘‘Can’t you be friendly?’’ Indirect: ‘‘Please be friendly to other people.’’ Literal: ‘‘Are you unable to be friendly?’’ The indirect meanings of these stories’ last lines can be viewed as their conventional interpretations. When understanding the literal, nonconventional uses of these sentences (i.e., the literal question), participants may analyze the conventional request meaning of these expressions before deciding that the nonconventional, literal meanings are appropriate. When reading literal questions, participants’ responses to both the literal and conventional targets should be fast relative to the time it takes to respond to unrelated targets. However, participants’ response times for literal targets should be slow if they do not ordinarily analyze the literal interpretations of indirect requests. The results first showed that people take less time to read indirect requests than literal uses of the same expressions. This finding replicates Gibbs (1979). The results of this study showed that when people read indirect requests they were much faster to make the sentence classification responses for indirect targets than for literal ones. Moreover, there was no significant difference in response times for the literal and unrelated targets when participants read indirect requests. These data indicate that there was no residual left from the participants’ processing of the literal meanings of

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the indirect requests that subsequently facilitated their responses to the literal targets. This suggests that people do not necessarily analyze the literal interpretation of an indirect speech act during their immediate comprehension. Similar findings have been reported for idioms (Gibbs, 1986c). These studies on idioms and indirect requests include both the speeded responsetimes and complete literal meanings as test phrases that are essential factors in examining the predictions of the standard pragmatic and direct access views. Moreover, as suggested in Gibbs (1983, 1986c), these data are also inconsistent with claims that the literal and figurative, or indirect, meanings of idioms or indirect request are processed in parallel, given that no activation of the idioms’ or indirect requests’ literal meanings was found in these studies (although note above my criticism of the different meanings equals different linguistic processes idea). Despite my belief that the Gibbs (1983, 1986c) studies generally represent the right way of trying to falsify the direct access view, I am not convinced that the specific method and stimuli used there are completely satisfactory. First, these studies only examined conventional aspects of figurative language. This is not by itself problematic as the standard pragmatic model applies to all kinds of figurative and indirect speech. Yet more studies should indeed look at whether the complete literal meanings of novel figurative utterances play some role in their comprehension. One immediate difficulty with studying novel aspects of figurative language is that many novel metaphors, for instance, are literally anomalous (i.e., My criticism is a branding iron), making it impossible to construct meaningful literal targets for the phrase classification task. But it might be possible to conduct similar experiments with novel proverbs which are literally meaningful. A second problem with the above studies is that the task of asking people to judge the meaningfulness of an entire sentence, after reading an idiom or indirect request, may involve post hoc cognitive processes that have little to do with what occurs when people read the previous statements (i.e., the idioms or indirect requests). Finally, the design of these studies didn’t sufficiently include conditions to examine whether the priming effects were due to facilitation of figurative meaning as opposed to inhibition of literal meaning. Clearly, there is much more work to be done. Yet, my point still stands that the direct access view can only be falsified if both processing times are compared for literal and figurative utterances and it can be shown that the extra time used to process figurative language is specifically due to activation, and then rejection, of a sentence’s complete literal meaning. Even if some data are obtained in the appropriate experimental situation, we still need to better understand if literal meaning is actually rejected, or if a sentence’s literal meaning sometimes plays a positive role in interpreting a speaker’s figurative meaning.

6. Figurative foundation of literal meaning My claim is that without a better idea of what constitutes literal meaning at both the word and sentence level, it will be difficult to interpret the findings of these newer

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studies looking at literal meaning in figurative language interpretation, especially in regard to the debate over the standard pragmatic and direct access views. Another important point to remember, or realize for the first time, is that many aspects of what might be termed ‘‘literal’’ speech have their roots in figurative thought and language. As cognitive linguists have demonstrated, for example, different figurative schemes of thought, most notably metaphor and metonymy, underlie systematic patterns of conventional linguistic expressions, historical development of word and phrase meanings, and novel linguistic expressions (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff and Turner, 1989; Sweetser, 1990). A great amount of experimental research in psycholinguistics shows that people have tacit knowledge of conceptual metaphors, for instance, that partly motivates how they learn, make sense of, and comprehend different linguistic expressions (Gibbs, 1994). These studies collectively call into question any simple distinction between literal and figurative meanings and emphasize the figurative nature of much language that people, at times, may refer to as ‘‘literal’’. Simply referring to some pieces of language as ‘‘literal’’ and others as ‘‘figurative’’, or whatever other tropes may be of interest, does not empirically establish that literal meanings are somehow different than figurative meanings, or are produced and understood by different cognitive mechanisms. My continued plea is that scholars not refer to any linguistic expression as ‘‘literal’’ unless theoretical reasons can be clearly stated as to what makes this type of meaning different from all other kinds of meaning (e.g., metaphoric, metonymic, poetic, and so on). I raise this issue here as an important challenge for researchers looking at the role of so-called ‘‘literal’’ meanings in understanding what speakers say and implicate.

7. The problem of what speakers say The original proposals on literal meaning in indirect and figurative language understanding assumed that an analysis of what speakers literally say is in many cases an important part of interpreting what speakers implicate in context. Consider again the exchange between two college students: Steve: Are you going to the big party this weekend? Beth: Didn’t you hear that Bob is going to be there? Under the traditional Gricean view, what Beth says here only conveys part of the meaning she wishes to communicate. Thus, what speakers say is indeed part of what listeners must understand, yet understanding what is said alone is insufficient. Listeners presumably take what speakers literally say and expand upon it by applying enriched pragmatic knowledge to draw a conversational implicature about what the speaker really meant. This view assumes that what a speaker says is equivalent to an utterance’s semantic or literal meaning. Most linguists and psycholinguists maintain a similar belief about the close, if not isomorphic, relationship between literal meaning and what speakers say. Many scholars, following Grice, maintain that

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pragmatics play at best only a small part in determining what speakers literally say. My earlier empirical work on indirect speech acts (Gibbs, 1979, 1983), idioms (Gibbs, 1980, 1986a), and sarcasm (Gibbs, 1986b, 1986c) was consistent with this view in characterizing literal meaning as equivalent to context-free, semantic meaning. To some degree, the most recent psycholinguistic studies described above also implicitly adhered to the distinction between context-free literal meaning and pragmatically determined figurative meaning. I now argue that this view of literal meaning as equivalent to ‘‘said’’ or ‘‘semantic’’ meaning is incorrect. Significant aspects of what speakers say, and not just what they totally communicate, are deeply dependent upon enriched pragmatic knowledge. Under this revised view, people may indeed analyze aspects of what speakers say as part of understanding what speakers conversationally implicate.

8. A revised view of what speakers say In recent years, several linguists and philosophers have persuasively argued that the traditional, Gricean view ignores the fact that essentially the same sorts of inferential processes used to determine conversational implicatures also enter into determining what is speakers say (Sperber and Wilson, 1986; Carston, 1988, 1993; Recanati, 1989, 1993; Wilson and Sperber, 1993;). Consider a case where a speaker says to you I haven’t eaten. In this case, at least once the indexical references and the time of the utterance are fixed, the literal meaning of the sentence determines a definite proposition, with a definite truth condition, which can be expressed as ‘‘The speaker has not eaten prior to the time of the utterance.’’ This paraphrase reflects the minimal proposition expressed by I haven’t eaten (Recanati, 1989). However, a speaker of I haven’t eaten is likely to be communicating not a minimal proposition, but some pragmatic expansion of it, such as ‘‘I haven’t eaten today.’’ This possibility suggests that significant pragmatic knowledge plays a role in enabling listeners to expand upon the minimal proposition expressed to recover an enriched pragmatic understanding of what a speaker says. Gibbs and Moise (1997) demonstrated in several experimental studies that pragmatics plays a major role in people’s intuitions of what speakers say (for further discussion of these findings, see Gibbs, 1999; Nicole and Clark, 1999). Consider the expression Jane has three children. According the Gricean view, the interpretation that ‘‘Jane has exactly three children’’ comes from applying specific pragmatic information to the minimally-pragmatic proposition of what is said (e.g., ‘‘Jane has at least three children), a process that results in what Grice referred to as a generalized conversational implicature (i.e., implicatures that are normally drawn regardless of the context). But we showed, in a series of experiments looking at students’ intuitions about what speakers say, that people do not equate the minimal meaning with what a speaker says. A first study asked participants to choose between two paraphrases of what a speaker says by different indicative utterances (e.g., cardinal sentences like Jane has three children, possession sentences like Robert broke a finger yesterday, scalar sentences like Everybody went to San Francisco, time-distance sentences like It

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will take us some time to get there, and temporal relation sentences like Amy bought a new dress and she went out dancing). Each of these sentences are traditionally viewed as conveying generalized conversational implicatures. Participants chose significantly more enriched pragmatic paraphrases of what speakers say (e.g., ‘‘Jane has exactly three children’’), than they did paraphrases that were minimally pragmatic (e.g., ‘‘Jane has at least three children and may have more than three’’). A second study revealed that even when alerted to the Gricean position (i.e., what is said is equivalent to the minimal proposition expressed), people still reply that enriched pragmatics is part of their interpretation of what a speaker says and not just what the speaker implicates in context. The fact that people prefer enriched pragmatic paraphrases for what speakers say does not mean that they are unable to distinguish between what speakers say and what they implicate. The findings of another study reported in Gibbs and Moise (1997) demonstrated that people recognize a distinction between what speakers say, or what is said, and what speakers implicate in particular contexts. For instance, consider the following story: Bill wanted to date his co-worker Jane. Being rather shy and not knowing Jane very well, Bill asked his friend, Steve, about Jane. Bill didn’t even know if Jane was married or not. When Bill asked Steve about this, Steve replied ‘‘Jane has three children.’’ What does Steve say and what does he implicate by his utterance? Steve implicates by his statement Jane has three children in this context that ‘‘Jane is already married.’’ To the extent that people can understand what Steve says, but not implicates, by ‘‘Jane has three children,’’ they should be able to distinguish between the enriched and implicated paraphrases of the final expressions. The results of one study showed this to be true. When participants were asked to choose the best paraphrase of what a speaker says in a context like the above one, they chose one that reflected the enriched pragmatic meaning (i.e., ‘‘Jane has exactly three children’’) and not implicature paraphrases (i.e., ‘‘Jane is married’’). These findings show that pragmatics strongly influences people’s understanding of what speakers both say and communicate. It appears that Grice’s examples of generalized conversational implicatures are not implicatures at all but understood as part of what speakers say. More generally, the Gibbs and Moise (1997) findings suggest that the distinction between saying and implicating is orthogonal to the division between semantics and pragmatics. These data suggest that different aspects of pragmatics may be accessed when people understand what speakers say and implicate. One possibility is that there are two kinds of pragmatic information or knowledge, primary and secondary, that become activated during normal language understanding (Recanati, 1993; Gibbs and Moise, 1997). Primary pragmatic knowledge applies deep, default background knowledge to provide an interpretation of what speakers say. Under this view, primary pragmatic knowledge relates to deeply held, perhaps non-representational

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(Searle, 1983) knowledge that is so widely shared as to seem invisible. To take a classic example (Searle, 1978), our interpretation of the expression The cat is on the mat presupposes an enumerable set of assumptions, such as that the cat chose for some reason to sit on the mat, and that the cat and mat are on the ground operating under the constraints of physical laws like gravity and are not floating in space in such a way that the cat is on the mat by virtue of touching the underneath part of the mat as in The fly is on the ceiling. Our ability to infer what speakers say when uttering any word or expression rests, to a large part, on deeply held background knowledge that is very much part of our pragmatic understanding of the world. Secondary pragmatic knowledge, on the other hand, refers to information from context that provides an interpretation of what speakers implicate in discourse. For instance, a speaker who utters The cat is on the mat might implicate that the addressee should get up and let the cat outside. Listeners draw the appropriate inferences about what speakers intend by recognizing specific features of the local context based on the common ground between themselves and speakers (i.e., their mutual beliefs, attitudes, knowledge). Thus, a speaker and listener may have as part of their common ground that the cat usually desires to go outside when it sits on the mat by the front door. Overall, though, listeners’ stereotypical background knowledge dominates the application of secondary pragmatic information to reveal what is said by a speaker’s utterance as distinct from what the speaker implicates (See Recanati, 1993). Note that I have not assumed primary and secondary pragmatic knowledge necessarily reflects different cognitive processes (Recanati, 1993, describes these as ‘‘processes’’). Moreover, it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict in advance which pragmatic knowledge is best viewed as primary and prominent in understanding what speakers say and what pragmatic knowledge is secondary, that is, essential for inferring what speaker’s conversationally implicate. One possibility is that primary pragmatic information is more salient and accessed more quickly than more elaborate, local, secondary pragmatic information (cf. Recanati, 1993). Very recent experimental evidence lends credence to this idea. Two studies by Hamblin and Gibbs (2000) examined the speed with which people understand expressions in which speakers’ communicative intentions were either identical to what they pragmatically said, or varied in some way, thus requiring listeners/readers to derive a conversational implicature. Consider the following stories, each of which end with the same sentence: Said/implied identical Ted and Michele ran into each other at the mall. Ted asked Michele what she had been doing lately. Michele said that she had been busy car shopping. Looking for ideas, Michele decided to consult Ted. Michele asked Ted about his own car. Ted mentioned: ‘‘I drive a sports utility vehicle’’. (enriched pragmatic meaning) Said/implied different

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Ted and Michele are planning a trip to Lake Tahoe. Michele had heard that there was a terrible storm there. She wondered if it was going to be safe for them to go. Michele was concerned about the vehicle they would drive. She asked Ted if he thought they would be okay. Ted replied: ‘‘I drive a sports utility vehicle’’. (implicature) In the first context, what the speaker pragmatically says by I drive a sports utility vehicle is identical to what he implies in that there is no further pragmatic meaning he wishes for listeners to infer beyond that he drives a particular kind of car. But in the second context, the speaker not only says one thing (i.e., about the kind of car he drives), but also implies something beyond that meaning, namely that his particular car is safe to drive in a storm. If people access primary pragmatic information sooner than they do secondary pragmatic knowledge, readers should take less time to comprehend utterances in which what speakers mean is identical to what they pragmatically say than to understand messages in which what speakers say underdetermines what they mean. In the first study, twenty-four undergraduate students read stories like the above (there were a total of 24), line-by-line on a computer screen, pushing a button as they read and understood each line. We measured the amount of time participants took to read each line (starting from when the sentence first appeared on the screen and ending when the participants pushed the comprehension button). We were specifically interested in how long it took readers to understand the last line of each story. An individual participant saw only one of the two stories presented above, but across all the conditions, an equal number of participants saw the said/implied identical and the said/implied different stories. The results showed that people took longer on average to understand what speakers meant when their utterances varied from what they simply said (1751 ms) than when speakers’ meant only what they pragmatically said (an explicature) (1604 ms). These findings demonstrate that drawing conversational implicatures increases processing effort beyond the effort needed to understand what speakers say. Moreover, the data are consistent with the idea that people analyze what speakers say as part of their determination of what speakers imply. A second experiment investigated processing of what speakers say and imply in a different way. Consider the following story, and two different final expressions: Bill is a new tenant in an apartment building. His neighbor Jack has lived there for four years. Bill was concerned that the building might be too loud. Bill decided to ask a neighbor about it. Bill asked Jack since he was the only neighbor Bill had met. Jack replied, ‘‘This is a very noisy building.’’ (said/implied identical) ‘‘I usually sleep with earplugs.’’ (said/implied different)

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Understanding I usually sleep with earplugs demands that listeners draw a pragmatic inference beyond that needed to understand what this same expression pragmatically says. However, understanding This is a very noisy building in this context only requires listeners/readers to comprehend what the speaker pragmatically said. For this reason, participants should take less time to read This is a very noisy building than I usually sleep with earplugs in this context. Twenty-four undergraduate students participated in this study. Across all the stimuli in this study, people took significantly more time to read sentences necessitating the implicatures (1661 ms) than they did the sentences requiring only enriched pragmatic said meanings (1511 ms). Once again, it appears that people more easily understand speakers’ messages when these are identical to what they pragmatically say than when what is said undeterdetermines what the speakers intend to communicate (i.e., conversational implicatures). The data from both studies suggest that people may actually process what speakers pragmatically say as an automatic part of their interpretation of what speakers communicate. My main conclusion from this set of reading-time experiments is that pragmatics is not simply used in understanding speakers’ intended meaning, but plays a role in utterance interpretation from the earliest stages of linguistic processing. In this sense, Grice was right in suggesting that people may analyze what speakers say before inferring what they implicate. But Grice and others are incorrect in assuming that understanding what speakers say refers to minimally-pragmatic meaning and that enriched pragmatics only has a role in deriving conversational implicatures.

9. What is said and figurative language understanding How do we reconcile the new view on the pragmatics of what is said with the extensive data from psycholinguistics that people can quickly understand many instances of figurative language without having to first analyze the entire literal meanings of these statements? Does not the fact that people can understand the meanings of metaphors and ironies, for instance, more quickly than when these same statements are used literally, argue against the idea that inferring what speakers imply takes longer than understanding what they simply say? At first glance, the findings of Gibbs and Moise (1997) and Hamblin and Gibbs (2000) appear to support the standard pragmatic model in which the literal-said meaning is processed first before enriched pragmatic knowledge is used to infer what speakers implicate. My argument, however, is that these empirical findings support a revised view of speaker meaning in which listeners analyze what speakers pragmatically say as a critical part of the understanding process. Nevertheless, understanding what speakers pragmatically say is not all identical to the putative, non-pragmatic literal meanings of speakers’ utterances. Under what conditions will listeners’ analyses of what speakers say demand more cognitive effort to understand what speakers mean to communicate? There are several possibilities worth considering. The first point to note is that the conventionality of what speakers say will have a facilitatory influence in understanding what they

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imply. Most studies on figurative language understanding, for instance, only examine interpretation of conventional language. People find highly conventionalized uses of metaphors, idioms, indirect speech acts, etc. very easy to understand. On the other hand, understanding that I usually wear earplugs communicates ‘‘The building is noisy’’ requires listeners or readers to draw a novel inference about the relation between a statement about the speaker’s use of earplugs and the topic of the conversation, namely, whether or not the building is noisy. Inferring this kind of conversational implicature might, indeed, take people longer to do than to comprehend conveyed meanings of conventional indirect and figurative language. Although it is certainly true that one’s familiarity with well-known figurative expressions facilitates one’s processing of these statements, several studies also demonstrate that people can process novel instances of metaphor and irony in context as quickly as they do literal uses of the same statements (or when what is said and meant are identical) (Gibbs, 1994). A second explanation for the possible discrepancy between the findings of the Hamblin and Gibbs (2000) reading time studies and the previous research on figurative language understanding is that some aspects of figurative meaning are understood as part of what speakers say and others as part of what speakers implicate. For instance, several linguists have argued that the nonliteral meanings of certain indirect speech acts (e.g., Can you pass the salt?), metonymies (e.g., The buses are on strike), and ironies (e.g., You’re a fine friend) are understood as part of our interpretation of what a speaker says, called explicatures (Groefsema, 1992; Papafragou, 1996), and not derived as conversational implicatures. Under this view, the context-appropriate meaning of, say, an ironic remark is completely captured by understanding what the speaker pragmatically said. The listener only needs to recognize how a speaker’s utterance reflects another thought attributed to somebody else (Papafragou, 1996). Recognizing that what a speaker says echoes some other thought, or previous utterance, conveys the speaker’s attitute of amused rejection of this thought. All of the assumptions needed to infer this aspect of speaker meaning are understood as part of what is said (or as explicatures). There are certainly cases of irony that demand further elaboration of what speakers say to infer their intended communicative messages. For instance, if I say to a passenger in my car love drivers who signal before turning right after some other driver has cut in front of me without signaling, the listener will likely need to expand on what I have said to correctly infer my ironic meaning. There may not be a hardand-fast rule that determines which kind of irony is understood as an explicature, and which as an implicature. Yet there is sufficient pragmatic information, perhaps part of people’s deep background knowledge, that allows them in some cases to quickly infer some figurative meanings without having to apply very local, contextually-specific, pragmatic information. This possibility certainly fits in with the empirical results showing that people can easily comprehend many kinds of figurative language (Gibbs, 1994). But no research, thus far, has explicitly attempted to link quick processing of figurative language with the new view on the pragmatics of what is said. A final point regarding the various empirical findings focuses on the different roles that what is said plays in understanding figurative language as opposed to the

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indicative utterances studied in the Gibbs and Moise (1997) and the Hamblin and Gibbs (2000) experiments. Consider again the utterance Jane has three children when used to communicate that ‘‘Jane is married.’’ Understanding what is implicated by this utterance is accomplished by virtue of our recognition of the pragmatically said interpretation that Jane has only three children. Many of the novel proverbs studied by Temple and Honeck (1998) may also be understood in this manner. On the other hand, understanding the intended meanings of many metaphors and idioms is accomplished in spite of what these expressions specifically say. In many cases of figurative language understanding, processing what a speaker says is short-circuited in favor of processing what that utterance is intended to communicate in context. For example, our understanding of the metaphorical expression The old rock was brittle with age, stated by one student to another in reference to an elderly professor, might not require that we first determine what the speaker specifically says. Instead, the normal process of referential assignment when reading the phrase the old rock prompts people to quickly seek an alternative figurative meaning that makes sense in the discourse situation. In some specialized and highly available contexts, the metaphoric interpretation is accessed first. This quick search for nonliteral meanings in context provides one main reason why metaphorical utterances can be understood as fast as, if not faster, than literal uses of the same expressions. In other cases, understanding what a speaker says will lead us to draw further figurative inferences as implicatures. Just as a speaker might say Jane has three children to imply that ‘‘Jane is married,’’ a speaker might say I love drivers who signal before changing lanes to ironically implicate that ‘‘I hate the driver who just switched lanes without signaling.’’ What a speaker says in both of these instances underdetermines what he or she wants to communicate. Understanding what speakers actually intend requires that we elaborate on the pragmatic interpretation of what is said by applying secondary pragmatic information to infer what he or she really implicates. Drawing inferences about what speakers figuratively communicate beyond what they pragmatically say may, under some circumstances, take additional processing effort. Interestingly, there are occasions when understanding what someone says automatically leads one to infer a figurative meaning even if the speaker didn’t necessarily intend that figurative meaning to be communicated. For instance, when someone is literally skating on thin ice, he also figuratively is ‘‘in a precarious situation.’’ Thus, listeners can draw inferences from something a speaker says to derive a figurative meaning, and this process takes longer than if people simply understood the phrase ‘‘skating on thin ice’’ as having only figurative, idiomatic meaning (Gibbs, 1986a). There is clearly much further empirical work needed to look more closely at the role that pragmatics has in understanding what speakers say and implicate by their use of both expressions such as Jane has three children and different aspects of figurative speech. Understanding how different aspects of pragmatics interact with different types of linguistic information may provide essential clues to characterizing people’s on-line comprehension of pragmatic meaning. It may be that some aspects of indirect language are understood as part of what speakers say, while others are understood as part of what speakers implicate in specific discourse contexts. People

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may sometimes construct representations of what speakers say as part of, or even before, what they understand speakers implicate, even if these ‘‘said’’ meanings are not related to traditional views of literal meaning.

10. Conclusion For several decades now, language theorists and researchers from many disciplines have argued about the possible role that literal meaning plays in understanding what speakers intend to communicate. My comprehensive reviews of the psycholinguistic literature back in 1984 and 1994 led me to conclude that little evidence supported the idea that people analyzed the literal meanings of nonliteral utterances during their ordinary interpretations of these expressions (Gibbs, 1994). There have been various responses to this conclusion from both philosophers (Dascal, 1987) and psycholinguists. Many psycholinguists, in particular, have quite recently attempted to show that literal meaning is indeed automatically analyzed when people process figurative language. As I have argued in this article, many of these experimental studies conflate aspects of literal and nonliteral meanings and often confuse what occurs during processing of lexical meaning with what occurs when entire utterances are interpreted. For these reasons, I claim, once again, that little empirical evidence exists to support the idea that people process the complete literal meanings of utterances either before or in parallel to understanding what speakers communicate by indirect, conveyed, or figurative language. Certain philosophical arguments are consistent with this perspective on linguistic understanding (Recanati, 1995). At the same time, it is still entirely unclear even whether people automatically analyze the ‘‘literal’’ meanings of individual words during on-line utterance interpretation. The fact that people clearly analyze something about what words mean in immediate utterance comprehension does not imply that the meanings of the words activated are necessarily their ‘‘literal’’ meanings. Without a better idea of what constitutes ‘‘literalness’’ at both the word and sentence level, it seems safer not to assume that processing of ‘‘literal’’ meanings constitutes the default mode of linguistic understanding. I suggest that the pursuit of ‘‘literal meaning’’ in theories of linguistic meaning and understanding is a fruitless exercise, especially when one is interested in exploring how people ordinarily produce and understand language. Despite these criticisms of literal meaning in understanding what speakers communicate, there is now good empirical evidence to suggest that people (a) can distinguish between what speakers say and implicate, (b) that understanding what speakers say and implicate both involve enriched pragmatic knowledge, and (c) that people may indeed ordinarily process what speakers pragmatically say as part of their understanding what speakers implicate. Under this new view of speaker meaning, what are traditionally viewed as generalized implicatures are really part of the retrieval of what is said. The Gricean distinction between generalized implicatures and what is said is, therefore, unnecessary. Moreover, the distinction between what is said and what is implicated is orthogonal to the putative distinction between semantics and pragmatics. According to Kaplan (1989), a semantic theory

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must be grounded in speakers’ intuitions about what is said (see Cappelan and Lepore, 1997 for critical discussion of this claim). Yet, if people’s intuitions about what speakers say involve enriched pragmatic knowledge, then the link between semantics and what is said has little empirical validity. Most generally, my thesis is that pragmatic information pervades all aspects of utterance interpretation. Some scholars may now argue that literal meaning provides the foundation for determining what is pragmatically said even if what is said and literal meaning can no longer be equated. I see no reason at this point to agree with this claim. No empirical evidence from psycholinguistics exists to show that there is some canonical, non-pragmatic meaning that is automatically analyzed at both the word and sentence level, which in turn feeds into a higher-level pragmatic processor used to interpret what speakers pragmatically say and implicate. At the very least, before any claims can be made in favor of literal meaning in normal utterance interpretation, scholars will need to be much more explicit about what constitutes literal meaning than they have been up till now. My earlier writings on literal meaning in utterance interpretation were criticized by some scholars on the grounds that people do not infer speakers’ intended messages by context alone, and must do something with the actual words heard or read. Moreover, there must be occasions when some aspect of what speakers say specifies part of what they actually implicate in context. Dascal (1987), for instance, argued for the thesis of moderate literalism to capture some of the pragmatic aspects of what people say as part of what constitutes ‘‘literal meaning.’’ Although I see no reason to posit a level of literal analysis in a theory of utterance interpretation, I now agree that people distinguish between what speakers say and implicate, that both aspects of speaker meaning involve substantial pragmatic knowledge, and that people may analyze what speakers pragmatically say as part of their understanding of what speakers imply. There is much theoretical and empirical work left to be done on how different aspects of pragmatics shape understanding of what speakers say and implicate, as well as a need for experimental research examining understanding of speakers’ utterances in which what is pragmatically said and implied vary from one another in different ways.

Acknowledgements I thank Mira Ariel and Rachel Giora for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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