The conditions for verbal irony comprehension implicitly or directly claimed as necessary by all of the recent philosophic, linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of verbal irony (Clark and Gerrig 1984; Kreuz and Glucksberg 1989; Kumon-Nakamura, Glucksberg and Brown 1995; Sperber and Wilson 1981, 1986) were experimentally tested. Allusion to a violation of expectations, predictions, desires, preferences, social norms, etc., was confirmed as a necessary condition, but pragmatic insincerity was not. Pragmatically sincere comments can be comprehended ironically. A revised set of conditions (...) was proposed, involving intentional violation of Gricean conversational maxims and the portrayal of a contrast between expectations and reality. A cautionary note was made, however, regarding the viability of a single account of verbal irony comprehension. (shrink)

Using Figurative Language presents results from a multidisciplinary decades-long study of figurative language that addresses the question, 'Why don't people just say what they mean?' This research empirically investigates goals speakers or writers have when speaking figuratively, and concomitantly, meaning effects wrought by figurative language usage. These 'pragmatic effects' arise from many kinds of figurative language including metaphors, verbal irony, idioms, proverbs and others. Reviewed studies explore mechanisms - linguistic, psychological, social and others - underlying pragmatic effects, some traced to (...) basic processes embedded in human sensory, perceptual, embodied, cognitive, social and schematic functioning. The book should interest readers, researchers and scholars in fields beyond psychology, linguistics and philosophy that share interests in figurative language - including language studies, communication, literary criticism, neuroscience, semiotics, rhetoric and anthropology. (shrink)

Preface -- Acknowledgments -- A note on examples -- 1. The coin toss -- 2. Deviance -- 3. Omission -- 4. Imprecision -- 5. Indirectness -- 6. Figurativeness -- 7. Language play -- 8. THE social media -- 9. The art of language -- 10. The end game -- Epilogue: A clearing revealing an eclipse -- References -- Index.

The conditions for verbal irony comprehension implicitly or directly claimed as necessary by all of the recent philosophic, linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of verbal irony were experimentally tested. Allusion to a violation of expectations, predictions, desires, preferences, social norms, etc., was confirmed as a necessary condition, but pragmatic insincerity was not. Pragmatically sincere comments can be comprehended ironically. A revised set of conditions was proposed, involving intentional violation of Gricean conversational maxims and the portrayal of a contrast between expectations and (...) reality. A cautionary note was made, however, regarding the viability of a single account of verbal irony comprehension. (shrink)

In China, the transformation from a centrally planned economy to one dominated by market forces has been characterized by the devolution of authority from the center to localities. This is as true of the enormous state bureaucracy associated with the control of fertility as it is with the economic bureaucracies more often studied in transitional societies. Using observations from several field sites, the authors document how county-, township-and village-level family planning cadres have gone from being agents of the state to (...) autonomous actors who must negotiate between the ongoing demands of the central bureaucracy and the new opportunities available in the locales in which they work and dwell. They suggest that any serious change in the draconian restrictions on fertility that have obtained in China for almost thirty years is likely to derive from initiatives at the local level. Local actors have already begun to adjust to the tensions between responsibilities and available resources that have tended to induce paralysis in the upper levels of this long-standing state bureaucracy. (shrink)

References to mirrors were frequent in medieval texts both theological and literary, and their meanings have been abundantly studied, especially recently. Medieval writers were primarily inspired by St. Paul's famous metaphor in his First Letter to the Corinthians 13.12–13: “Now we see only puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we shall see face to face. My knowledge now is partial; then it will be whole, like God's knowledge of me. In a word, there are three things that last forever: (...) faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of them all is love.” Mirrors were also likened to art in many texts; and so they have functioned mightily in investigations of visuality. To cite just one medieval text among many, on Mallorca in 1276, Inghetto Contardo defended pictures against a Jew's alleged attack by asserting that “the holy mother Church sets images out as a kind of mirror, so that seeing them with corporal eyes they see them with the eyes of the mind.” The claim here was that physical images, made possible by Christ's incarnation, were available to human senses and could be formed into a complete picture when they were assimilated with a memory of God's true nature. Hildegard of Bingen had already summed up the idea succinctly: “That [faith] Adam had when he saw with bodily eyes the invisible light of God … but after his disobedience, neither Adam nor any other man could have this vision; for that reason, the faithful can gaze at God only with the interior vision of the soul, in the mirror of faith, and trust to be able to be saved with him who can do all things.” Inghetto was also assimilating the ancient trope to new theories of vision being promulgated at the time by Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, and Witelo and in such popular works as Peter of Limoges's Tractatus moralis de oculo, a preacher's manual composed exactly at the time of the Mallorca debate and very widely circulated afterward. In these, the site of seeing was literally a mirror, namely, the “crystalline humor” where God's light, located in the anterior part of the brain, is unified with rays from the eyes into a double vision. (shrink)

This unique bibliography offers a scholarly listing of Schiller materials, with mention in the preface of special works. An introductory essay discusses Schiller's pragmatic humanism and features a list of biographical references.

Philosophers investigating the nature of knowledge from Bacon and Descartes to logical empiricism, have sought to understand its character by means of the distinction between the content of knowledge, and the abstract logical and mathematical principles which regulate its structure or form. The nature of the distinction, the relative roles of content and form, and the relationships between the two, however, have been given widely divergent interpretations.

Byrne & Russon propose an account of imitation that mirrors levels of behavioral organization, but they perpetuate a tendency to dismiss imitation by members of most species as the result of more primitive processes, even though these alternative phenomena are often poorly understood. They argue that the prerequisites to program-level imitation are present in great apes, but the same prerequisites appear to be present in a broad range of species. The distribution of imitative capacity across species may be more limited (...) by research methodology than by cognitive ability. (shrink)

There is an irony in that, the modern empirical and scientific study of metaphor, as arguably the major form of figurativity, arose in part from a realization that metaphor resides in territories s...