Previous work has shown that prior experience in language brokering (informal translation) may facilitate the processing of meaning within and across language boundaries. The present investigation examined the influence of brokering on bilinguals' processing of two word collocations with either a literal or a figurative meaning in each language. Proficient Spanish-English bilinguals classified ...

juxtaposition of words is a linguistic phenomenon that exists in all languages and is not specific to a language and means common relationship of one word with other certain words in a language. juxtaposition of words is one of the most important issues of semantics because of its important role in determining meaning of many words and combinations. this verbal phenomenon is one of distinguishi...

Proverbs were used to examine reci)gt~it ion memon f o r four wpes of sentence information U?guraticr meaning, literal meaning, lexical inforrnutinn, syntactic information) with n\.u li'vels of comprehension. Forced-choice recognition tasks showed that subjects were s u ~ ~ c i ' s . ~ j i ~ I in rernetnhering al l fi111r t\'pes of infi)rrnation. Recognition scores for the f i f i i rcuin' t u ...

We challenge the commonly held view that the interpretation of metonymies should proceed from a literal-meaning-first approach and argue for an equally balanced treatment of literal and figurative language use. Resulting ambiguities are handled by a combination of two techniques. First, we incorporate discourse constraints into metonymy resolution, reflecting the systematic interaction patterns...

Metonymic location names refer to other, related entities and possess a meaning different from the literal, geographic sense. Metonymic names are to be treated differently to improve performance of geographic information retrieval (GIR). This paper presents a method for disambiguating location names in textual information to distinguish literal and metonymic senses, based on shallow features. T...

Syntactic and semantic processing of literal and idiomatic phrases were investigated with a priming procedure. In 3 experiments, participants named targets that were syntactically appropriate or inappropriate completions for semantically unrelated sentence contexts. Sentences ended with incomplete idioms (kick the...) and were biased for either a literal (ball) or an idiomatic (bucket) completi...

The notion of meaning is central to theories of language. However, there appears to be considerable confusion regarding what a theory of meaning should do, and how it pertains to other linguistic issues. In this paper, I attempt to rectify one aspect of this confusion, namely, the relation of literal meaning, sentence meaning, and speaker meaning. To do so, I present two polar opposites, a stan...

Poetic analysis involves the explication of a poem by focusing on the process of semiosis in it. Through semiosis linguistic meaning is transformed into stylistic meaning. An examination of semiosis brings us to look at the hypersemanticized poetic structures which are none other than the style features of a poem. Since style functions in a literary text by conveying meanings other than literal...

I have elsewhere argued (Ariel, 2002) against the assumption that we can identify one literal meaning per sentence. Instead, I have suggested that there are (at least) three types of minimal meanings, each differently motivated. One implicit motivation behind the classical definition of literal meaning (Grice’s ‘what is said’) is a wish to capture the core content of sentences. I here examine d...