Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 5, Issue 2, 1997

The confusion between sentential figurativeness and conventionality found in many of the experiments on figurative language comprehension is here disentangled by factorially crossing the figurativeness of a proverb (determined by discourse context) with conventionality (determined by familiarity of use). Familiar proverbs are conventionally used in their figurative (and not literal) sense whereas for unfamiliar proverbs the literal meaning (and not the figurative sense) is more available. Multiple dependent measures were employed: the time taken to read the target (experiments 1, 2 and 3), incidental recognition tests of target (experiments 1 and 2), recognition errors (experiments 1 and 2), interpretation errors (experiment 2), and recall aided by context-appropriate or inappropriate cues (experiment 3). Reading time data indicated that unfamiliar proverbs used figuratively took longer to read than the same proverb used literally or literal paraphrase controls. Familiar proverbs were read equally fast, whether understood as a literal or figurative statement. The pattern of memory errors and cued-recall data indicate that conventional meaning and literal meaning are both available in context-appropriate and context-inappropriate conditions, whereas unconventional meaning is available only in context-appropriate conditions.

While negatives are fundamental to the functioning of human languages and while they are acquired extremely early by children, there is some evidence that an aware-ness of the logical and representational functions of negation is late to develop and may depend in part on the invention of notational means for representing it. This hypothesis is explored by reference to the presence or absence of notations for negation in the world's writing systems, the acquisition of notational devices for representing negation by young children, and the invention of numerical notation for representing nothing, namely, zero. In each case it is argued that while negation is part of oral language, conceptualizing absence may be related to the invention of notations for negation.

The paper has a negative and a positive side. The negative side argues that the classical notions of narrow and wide content are not suitable for the purposes of psychological explanation. The positive side shows how to characterize an alternative notion of content (ecological content) that is suitable for those purposes. This account is supported by (a) a way of conceptualizing computation that is constitutively dependent upon properties external to the system and (b) empirical research in developmental psychology. My main contention is that an adequate computational explanation of the behavior involved in cognitive activities should invoke a concept of content that can capture the intimate dynamical relationship between the inner and the outer. The notion of content thus reaches out to include the set of skills, abilities and know-hows that an agent deploys in a constantly variable environment. The assumption underlying my attempt to characterize this ecological notion of content is that cognition is better understood when treated as embedded cognition and that the idea of cognitive significance ought to be cashed out in non-individualistic and pragmatic terms.

This paper assumes that the literary work of art is a "stratified system of norms", and that the description of each stratum may require a different kind of logic. One of the main problems is the meaningful integration of these descriptions. A speech sound may be described on an acoustic, a phonetic and a phonemic level; normally, its acoustic description is irrelevant to its linguistic or poetic significance. However, in certain circumstances, the acoustic description may account for the emotional quality of the speech sound, may yield insight into the rhythmic structure of a poem (or just of a performance thereof), etc. Furthermore, pieces of poetry may be used to illustrate psychological theories about the aesthetic event; or psychological theories may be used to yield insight into the aesthetic nature of pieces of poetry. The paper focuses on the methodological issues involved in foregrounding the possible aesthetic significance of the transitions from one level of description to another. In doing this, it attempts to carefully navigate between two theoretical extremes: a reductionist view of literary theory according to which all the "special sciences " can be reduced to "more basic sciences" and, eventually, to physics; and the one formulated by Wellek and Warren (1956:135) as follows: "The psychology of the reader, however interesting in itself and useful for pedagogical purposes, will always remain outside the object of literary study [...] it must be unrelated either to the structure or the quality of a poem ". The middle course here proposed relies on "the principle of marginal control", that is, "the control exercised by the organizational principle of a higher level on the particulars forming its lower level" (Polânyi, 1967: 40). Paraphrasing Polânyi, the principles of literature may be said to govern the boundary conditions of a cognitive system—a set of conditions that is explicitly left undetermined by the laws of lower processes — physical, cognitive, and linguistic. If one knows more about these "lower" processes, one may get a better understanding of the principles of literature that govern those boundary conditions. It is claimed that in this way Cognitive Poetics is capable of discerning and explaining significant literary phenomena which present insurmountable difficulties to other approaches.

We have developed a formal model of certain types of riddles, and implemented it in a computer program, JAPE, which generates simple punning riddles. In order to test the model, we evaluated the behaviour of the program, by having 120 children aged eight to eleven years old rate JAPE-generated texts, human-generated texts, and non-joke texts for "jokiness" and funniness. This confirmed that JAPE's output texts are indeed jokes, and that there is no significant difference in funniness or jokiness between JAPE"s most comprehensible texts and published human-generated jokes.