Jin, Shaokang; (2025) On the continuity between literal and metaphorical language use – An experimental investigation. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis outlines and defends a version of the continuity view of metaphor comprehension – that metaphorical language comprehension is, in a sense to be specified, continuous with literal language interpretations. Traditional approaches to metaphorical language use, due to philosophers such as Grice, Searle and Lewis propose a maxim or convention of literal truthfulness in language and communication, implying that metaphorical expressions, which are literally false such as “The dancer is a butterfly” & “The cat is a princess”, involve a different, indirect comprehension process compared to literal expressions. That is, non-literal meanings are derived only after defective literal meanings of metaphors are evaluated and rejected. As the basis of a cognitive model, such an indirect view implies that metaphors should be more costly to process, and involve attention to the literal meaning as part of that process. However, data from many psycholinguistic studies on metaphor have shown that this is not always the case. On the other hand, other data does suggest a cost for metaphor, and it also suggests the literal meaning is considered when metaphors are understood. This thesis takes as its starting point the version of the continuity view put forward in Sperber & Wilson (1986) and gives an outline of a Bayesian computational model inspired by this theory. The empirical chapters in the thesis revisit several important experimental paradigms in metaphor research and provide a new framing of previous results based on new research. In particular, we consider the literal truth-value judgement task developed by Glucksberg et al. (1982), a comprehensibility decision task as presented in Wolff & Gentner (2000), and the cross-modal priming paradigm used by Rubio Fernandez (2007, 2008) and Blasko & Connine (1993) among many other researchers. Overall results of the experiments reported in this study provide evidence for the continuity model of language processing. These results together offer support for the claim that metaphorical interpretations are continuous with literal interpretations. The primary aim of language comprehension, whether it is literal or metaphorical, is to compute the speaker’s goals by selecting potential implications from the semantic representation of the linguistic input.

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