On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language

Abstract

How do we learn to produce and comprehend non-literal language? Competing theories have only partially accounted for the variety of language comprehension evoked in metaphor, irony, and jokes. This book has developed a novel and comprehensive theory, the Graded Salience Hypothesis, to explain figurative language comprehension. The book contends that the salience of meanings (i.e., the cognitive priority we ascribe to words encoded in our mental lexicon) has the primary role in language comprehension and production.