28.2447, Review: English; Cognitive Science; Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics: Colston (2015)

Fri Jun 2 14:47:20 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2447. Fri Jun 02 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2447, Review: English; Cognitive Science; Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics: Colston (2015)

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Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2017 10:47:14
From: Weiwei Zhang [sunnyzww at gmail.com]
Subject: Using Figurative Language

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-388.html

AUTHOR: Herbet L Colston
TITLE: Using Figurative Language
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Weiwei Zhang, Shanghai International Studies University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Since figurative language is pervasive in real world communication and has a
higher potential for being ambiguous and misunderstood, the question, “Why
don’t people [just] say what they mean?” (p. 3) (or “why does figurative
language even exist?”), is frequently posed, especially by
non-academic-language users. With evidences from multi-disciplinary study of
figurative language, Herbert L. Colston’s book “Using Figurative Language”
intends to answer this overarching question by considering the many kinds of
figurative language and delineating different ways in which figurative 
language accomplishes pragmatic effects for both speakers and writers (p. 4).

This common question happens to be the title of the first chapter, which
introduces the themes of the book and gives an overview of the subsequent
chapters. Colston defines the notion of a “pragmatic effect” as “‘additional
complex meaning’...accomplished by a speaker’s use of figurative language” (p.
5), and he also provides caveats on the overall treatment of figurative
language and its pragmatic effects, given the different disciplines in which
figurative language is studied. 

Chapter 2 addresses the basic question of what the “additional complex
meaning”, i.e. “pragmatic effects”, of figurative language is. First, Colston
summarizes different treatments of pragmatic effects in terms of
linguistic/philosophical theoretical accounts (e.g. Speech Act Theory, Gricean
Theory, Relevance Theory) as well as psycholinguistic empirical accounts.
Then, Colston points out that pragmatic effects differ from other
categorizations, such as implicatures, positive cognitive effects,
interpretive hypotheses and inference, since pragmatic effects are structural,
embodied, psychological and sociocultural in nature. The recognition of the
social and cultural sources of pragmatic effects can extend the scope of
figurative language study in the sense of taking social situations such as
age, ethnicity, gender, occupation and other variables into accounts when
studying the subject.

Chapter 3, “What are the Pragmatic Effects?”, discusses the taxonomy of
pragmatic effects produced by figures, i.e. the categorical structure of
pragmatic effects. Acknowledging the heavy dependence on and interaction with
the contexts of pragmatic effects, Colston shows us how difficult it is to
delineate what kinds of pragmatic effects there are and then to explain what
causes them. Colston categorizes pragmatic effects into general pragmatic
effects (e.g. “ingratiation”, “mastery”, “persuasion”), which apply to the
entire family of figurative language types, and pragmatic effects that are
specific to single figures or figure families; for instance, “enhancing
meaning” is most prominently implemented by metaphor (p. 73), and
“objectification” is related to idioms and proverbs (p.74). For the underlying
causes of various pragmatic effects in figurative language use, Colston
discusses the linguistic, structural, juxtapositional, metapragmatic, social,
psychological, associative, stylistic, and embodied causes with ample
examples.

With the question of “How is Figurative Language Used” as the title, Chapter 4
mainly discusses the common ground in figurative language use. Colston pays
the most attention to the common ground of figures such as metaphor, verbal
irony, hyperbole, contextual expressions, idioms, and indirect requests,
showing the important role of common ground for production and comprehension
of those figures. Then Colston considers common ground from the viewpoint of
mainstream cognitive psychology, stating that many psychological phenomena
(e.g. memory, availability, automaticity, individual differences) may apply to
a rethinking of common ground in figurative language. After comparing common
ground in figurative versus nonfigurative language from three different
aspects, i.e. appropriateness, aptness, and indirectness, Colston shows that
some aspects might be somewhat more complex or weighty for some kinds of
figurative language in particular situations. To answer the question of “how
to use figurative language”, Colston demonstrates the impact of various
pragmatic effects from the speaker perspective at the end of the chapter.

In the last two chapters, Colston attempts to provide a roadmap of empirical
studies on figurative language, with Chapter 5 focusing on observational data
from corpora and Chapter 6 on empirical evidence from psycholinguistic
experiments. 

Colston’s concern in Chapter 5 is what figurative language use by people
actually is, including the issues of quantifying figures and assessing the
pragmatic effects that occur as a result of a figurative usage. To quantify
figurative language use of all kinds in all categories of usage, we first need
to have a reliable identification procedure for the figure at hand in corpus
data. Colston introduces identification procedures for several figurative
forms, for instance, the MIP or more recently the MIPVU (Pragglejaz Group
2007; Steen et al. 2010) for metaphor identification, the VIP (Burgers et al.
2011) for verbal irony identification. After identifying and quantifying the
figure, we need to assess whether and how often a pragmatic effect has
occurred as a result of a figurative usage. Colston provides two general
strategies as potential solutions: 1) measuring pragmatic effect prevalence in
corpora much like what was discussed for measuring figurative language
prevalences; 2) estimating pragmatic effect prevalence based on the effect’s
likely occurrence with that figure. Colston also points out that multivariate
analysis and modern statistical modeling approaches may be helpful in
answering the prevalence question. Then, Colston discusses the ways in which
figurative language and its pragmatic effects might be expanded to cover the
constraints on figurative language use and pragmatic effects  , such as time
related constraints, structural constraints.

The last chapter (Chapter 6) provides the concluding remarks and broadens the
perspective on figurative language use by treating figurative language as a
complex social phenomenon. Neural and behavioral evidence shows that the use
and comprehension of figurative language may be affected by a number of
social, psychological and embodied factors. Colston therefore highlights the
importance of context (discourse context, as well as the broader context of
social, psychological components) on figurative language cognition. Then
Colston presents a pragmatic effect organization based on clustering pragmatic
effects around their core origins, e.g. cognitive side effects (arising from
low-level cognitive process), positive cognitive effects (arising from
relevance theory), and other sets of pragmatic effects arising from social,
emotional processes. Finally, Colston advocates the expansion of figurative
language research to embrace more complex modeling and analysis of figurative
use and comprehension data, and to include multimodal, gestural and other
paralinguistics systems.

EVALUATION

As mentioned in the summary, the major goal of this book is to provide answers
to the fundamental question, “Why does figurative language even exist?”.
Colston efficiently achieves this goal. This book, a monograph which
summarizes his earlier publications on figurative language since the 1990s,
has several strong points. 

First and most importantly, this book is comprehensive in scope. On the one
hand, it incorporates interdisciplinary insights and explanations from
linguistics, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, philosophy and other fields
interested in figurative language. Furthermore, acknowledging figurative
language as a complex social phenomenon, Colson includes multimodal,
paralinguistic and metalinguistic research and embraces complex quantitative
analysis and modeling techniques (e.g. Campbell & Katz 2012; Gibbs & Colston
2012). On the other hand, the book extends its objects of study from metaphor
and metonymy, which are explored extensively in the field of Cognitive
Linguistics, to irony, hyperbole, idioms and indirect requests. With detailed
illustration and examples, Colson successfully shows the general pragmatic
effects of figurative language as well as pragmatic effects specific to single
figures or figure families. 

Second, the layout of the book is logical and clear. The order of the chapters
reflexive process of “theoretical framework-to-application”, with the first
two chapters focusing on the definition and scope of pragmatic effects that
figurative language affords its users. Chapters 3 and 4 review a wide range of
studies on the designation and categorization of figures by their pragmatic
effects. The final two chapters build a roadmap to applications  for
quantifying figurative language use and measuring pragmatic effects with
evidence from both corpus-based studies and psycholinguistic experiments.

Third, the book includes numerous examples taken from authentic texts by
speakers as well as various instances of pop culture (e.g. TV programs,
novels, commercials, cartoons and others). At the same time, Colston uses many
analogies to help readers understand abstract linguistic or psychological
notions. For instance, he uses a food metaphor to explain  out-of-context
pragmatic effects (p. 66), reproduction to explain juxtaposition as a cause of
pragmatic effects (p.90), and recipes to explain how figurative language is
used (p. 133). Thus the reader-friendly writing style is suitable for both
scholarly readers and non-academic readers.

The book has no major weaknesses, but minor issues may, nevertheless, be
raised. Colston mainly focuses on the figures of metaphor, metonymy, verbal
irony, hyperbole, and idiom, but disregards other kinds of figures
(alliteration, onomatopoeia, anadiplosis for instance), which might  also be
interesting to rhetoricians, and even to scholars from linguistics,
psychology, communication and sociology. Furthermore, some diagrams would
facilitate the reading. For instance, for the metaphor for pragmatic effects,
Colston uses Venn-like diagrams and terminology from speech act theory (p.
86). This would be easier to understand if Colston had added a graphic
representation. 

To sum it up, this book is a valuable contribution to figurative language
research. It contributes insights in both theoretical and practical aspects of
figurative language use and comprehension.

REFERENCES

Burgers, Christian, van Mulken, Margot & Peter Jan Schellens. 2011. Finding
irony: An introduction of the verbal irony procedure (VIP). Metaphor and
Symbol 26(3), 186–205. 

Campbell, John D. & Albert N. Katz. 2012. Are there necessary conditions for
inducing a sense of sarcastic irony? Discourse Processes 49(6), 459–80. 

Gibbs, Raymond W. & Herbert L. Colston 2012. Interpreting Figurative Meaning.
New York: Cambridge University Press.

Pragglejaz Group. 2007. MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used
words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22(1), 1–39 

Steen, Gerard J., Dorst, Aletta G., Herrmann, Berenike, Kaal, Anna, Krennmayr,
Tina & Trijntje Pasma. 2010. Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification:
>From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Weiwei Zhang is currently an assistant professor in the Institute of
Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University. She obtained a PhD
(2013) in Linguistics in the Research Unit of Quantitative Lexicology and
Variational Linguistics at University of Leuven. Her main areas of interest
are metaphor/metonymy research, lexical semantics, corpus linguistics, and
Cognitive Sociolinguistics.

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