Journal articles: 'Literal and non-literal meaning'

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Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard. "Literal Meaning." Journal of Pragmatics 38, no. 7 (July 2006): 1111–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2005.06.008.

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BACH, KENT. "Literal Meaning." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75, no. 2 (September 2007): 487–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2007.00088.x.

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B.B. Nimanuho, Maria Salvatrix. "THE ANALYSIS OF NON-LITERAL MEANING IN CHRISTMAS CAROL BY CHARLES DICKENS." JURNAL ILMIAH BAHASA DAN SASTRA 4, no. 2 (April 4, 2019): 104–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.21067/jibs.v4i2.3182.

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This study investigates non-literal meaning in ‘Christmas Carol’ story written by a famous British author, Charles Dickens. This study used a descriptive qualitative method. The data were taken or collected from words, phrases, and sentences on ‘Christmas Carol’ novella, without reducing, adding, or changing any parts from the original source. The data were analyzed to answer three research questions: (1) What types of non-literal meaning are found in Christmas Carol story? (2) What are the interpretations of those non-literal meanings found in Christmas Carol story? (3) What is the most dominant type of non-literal meaning found in Christmas Carol story? In order to avoid bias, validator triangulation was used. The study found 11 idiom, 14 Simile, 6 Hyperbole, 6 Alliteration, 5 Personification, 3 Anaphora, 3 Onomatopoeia, 2 Irony, 2 Synecdoche, 2 Sarcasm, 1 Metaphor, and 1 Litotes. Simile was the non-literal meaning’s type which was mostly used in the story, although the percentage was still less than 50%. These findings indirectly could help the readers to understand deeper the message or the story that the author wants to convey. It is suggested for future researchers to investigate the non-literal meaning of others literary works such as tale, folklore, fairy tale, short-story, fable, etc. and media such as movie, drama, speech script etc. It is because other type of non-literal meaning and different ways of using them could be found in these literary works and media. This study will improve our understanding about non-literal meaning. Keywords: Semantics, Non-Literal meaning, Christmas Carol, Novella, Charles Dickens

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Slioussar, Natalia, Tatiana Petrova, Ekaterina Mikhailovskaya, Natalia Cherepovskaia, Veronika Prokopenya, Daria Chernova, and Tatiana Chernigovskaya. "Experimental studies of grammar: Expressions with literal and non-literal meaning." Вопросы языкознания, no. 3 (June 2017): 83–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s0373658x0000997-5.

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Dascal, Marcelo. "Defending Literal Meaning." Cognitive Science 11, no. 3 (July 1987): 259–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1103_1.

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Borg, Emma. "Review: Literal Meaning." Mind 115, no. 458 (April 1, 2006): 461–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzl461.

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Lytinen, Steven L., Robert R. Burridge, and Jeffrey D. Kirtner. "THE ROLE OF LITERAL MEANING IN THE COMPREHENSION OF NON-LITERAL CONSTRUCTIONS." Computational Intelligence 8, no. 3 (August 1992): 416–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8640.1992.tb00373.x.

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Stern, Barbara B. "“Crafty Advertisers”: Literary versus Literal Deceptiveness." Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 11, no. 1 (March 1992): 72–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/074391569201100108.

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The purpose of this paper is to use literary theory to extend prior categorizations of message claims that are likely to result in deception by implication from the level of the individual claim to that of the advertisement's overall meaning. The paper will first summarize three literary forms that advertising has adapted—metonymy, irony, and absurdity—and discuss each in terms of how form and content interact to yield the whole verbal meaning of a text. These forms can be used to structure an ad so that the totality misleads the consumer by perverting meaning in three different ways. Metonymy can mislead by adding multiple meanings; irony, by hiding doubled meanings; and absurdism, by conveying subjectively ambiguous meanings. Advertising examples will be presented in the discussion. The paper will conclude with research suggestions for gaining greater understanding of how artistic creativity can be balanced with the public policy need to protect the consumer from deception by innuendo.

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WHITE, ROGER M. "Literal Meaning and “Figurative Meaning”." Theoria 67, no. 1 (February 11, 2008): 24–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-2567.2001.tb00195.x.

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Zawadowski, Leo. "Literal Value and Meaning." Meta: Journal des traducteurs 31, no. 2 (1986): 137. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/004639ar.

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Gibbs, Raymond W. "Understanding and Literal Meaning." Cognitive Science 13, no. 2 (April 1989): 243–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1302_5.

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Galántai, Dávid. "Literal meaning in translation." Perspectives 10, no. 3 (January 2002): 167–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0907676x.2002.9961443.

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Recanati, François. "Précis de Literal Meaning." Philosophiques 33, no. 1 (2006): 231. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/012955ar.

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Toolan, Michael. "Perspectives on literal meaning." Language & Communication 11, no. 4 (January 1991): 333–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(91)90036-u.

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Charlton, William. "BEYOND THE LITERAL MEANING." British Journal of Aesthetics 25, no. 3 (1985): 220–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/25.3.220.

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Marmor, Andrei. "Is Literal Meaning Conventional?" Topoi 27, no. 1-2 (July 2008): 101–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11245-008-9027-2.

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Talmage, C. J. L. "Literal meaning, conventional meaning and first meaning." Erkenntnis 40, no. 2 (March 1994): 213–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf01128593.

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Uwajeh, M. K. C. "Literal meaning in performative translatology." Perspectives 4, no. 2 (January 1996): 189–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0907676x.1996.9961286.

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Davis, Steven. "Literal Meaning de François Recanati." Philosophiques 33, no. 1 (2006): 263. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/012958ar.

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Spolsky, Ellen. "The Limits of Literal Meaning." New Literary History 19, no. 2 (1988): 419. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/469346.

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Harnish, Robert M. "Folk psychology and literal meaning." Pragmatics and Cognition 13, no. 2 (November 7, 2005): 383–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.13.2.07har.

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Recanati (2004), Literal Meaning argues against what he calls “literalism” and for what he calls “contextualism”. He considers a wide spectrum of positions and arguments from relevance theory to hidden variables theory. In the end, however, he seems to hold that semantic and pragmatic theorizing must answer to broadly introspective or folk psychological constraints — they don’t exist in “heaven”. After surveying Recanati’s wide-ranging and provocative discussion of these issues, we wonder why parity of reasoning does not condemn syntax and phonology, as customarily practiced.

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Gibbs, Raymond W., Darin L. Buchalter, Jessica F. Moise, and William T. Farrar. "Literal meaning and figurative language." Discourse Processes 16, no. 4 (October 1993): 387–403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01638539309544846.

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Guidotti, Tee L. "The Literal Meaning of Health." Archives of Environmental & Occupational Health 66, no. 3 (July 2011): 189–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19338244.2011.585096.

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Bokus, Barbara, and Piotr Kałowski. "Editorial Remarks: Beyond Literal Meaning. Metaphors." Psychology of Language and Communication 21, no. 1 (December 20, 2017): 380–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/plc-2017-0018.

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Abstract Following up on the previous special issue of Psychology of Language and Communication, devoted to irony, the current one concerns metaphors - another major form of non-literal language. The authors of the presented papers examine metaphor use and understanding in a wide variety of contexts, both in adult and child, as well as normal and abnormal populations. The result is a comprehensive survey of the current state of research, which opens further avenues of potentially fruitful inquiry.

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Clement, Joyana Dilam. "Menyirat Makna dalam Manisnya Rambutan Kampung dari Perspektif Kod Simbolik Roland Barthes." Malay Literature 33, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 193–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.37052/ml33(2)no3.

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This study aims to review the literal meaning of Zahari Affandiâ€™s Manisnya Rambutan Kampung. The focus of this research is the interpretation of the literal meaning presented by the writer through the use of symbols. The objectives of this study are to identify the significance of the literal meaning to the community, to analyze the literal meanings in the text from the symbolic code perspective, as well as to evaluate the extent to which the literal meanings in the text conform to connotative properties from this perspective. This research was carried out using a simple qualitative method. The data collected was each illustration of events that employed signs or symbols. Therefore, the research was performed using the Semiotic Theory of Roland Barthes, which focuses on the use of symbols. The present research uses this theory to explore the meanings of signs in a more detailed way in all instances that contain elements of signifiers and signifieds in the literary work. This is due to the fact that the symbols used by the writer in the work have both a literal and implied meaning. Based on the research, we conclude that Zahari Affandi inserted several symbols with their own meaning in his work to convey certain messages.

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van Ginkel, Wendy, and Ton Dijkstra. "The tug of war between an idiom's figurative and literal meanings: Evidence from native and bilingual speakers." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23, no. 1 (February 8, 2019): 131–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1366728918001219.

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AbstractIn two lexical-decision experiments, we investigated the processing of figurative and literal meaning in idioms. Dutch native and German–Dutch bilingual speakers responded to target words presented after a minimal context idiom prime (e.g., ‘He kicked the bucket’). Target words were related to the figurative meaning of the prime (‘die’), the literal word at the end of the idiom (‘water’), or unrelated to both (‘face’). We observed facilitation in RTs for figuratively and literally related targets relative to unrelated targets for both participant groups. A higher frequency idiom-final word caused inhibition in responses to the literally related target for native speakers, indicating competition between the idiom as a whole and its literal word constituents. Native speakers further showed sensitivity to transparency of the idiom's meaning and the plausibility of the idiom as a literally interpretable sentence. The results are interpreted in terms of available L1/L2 idiom comprehension models, and a more detailed processing account for literal and idiomatic sentence interpretation.

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Tabrizi, Taymaz G. "Islam and Literalism." American Journal of Islam and Society 31, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 111–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v31i1.1025.

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This book surveys the development of literal meaning and literalism in Islamand Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) in particular. The term literal meaningrefers to the meaning that a text is believed to hold “in itself” by virtue of thesound-meaning relationships of words that were “coined” (waḍ‘) at some pointin time. Although Muslim debates on how words were coined (see secondchapter) are quite interesting and at times entertaining, the origin of languagewas secondary to the language’s actual existence. In other words, legal theoristscontended that the establishment of the “sound-meaning connection” wasmore important than who established it and when.Literalism, the other focus of the book, is the view that Islamic law privilegesliteral meaning. As Gleave explains in his first chapter, literalism seesliteral meaning as having an “advantage” over allusion, metaphor (majāz),and other kinds of meaning because it holds a “higher level of epistemologicalsecurity” (p. 1). Detecting the author’s intended meaning, although ideal, isfraught with uncertainties for it involves discerning another person’s intentions.In other words, for legal theorists, the literal can be established througha strict science of language and more importantly functions as a “startingpoint” for understanding texts which gives it a central role in hermeneutics.Even if the literal meaning is shown not to be the author’s intended meaning,it is nevertheless essential for controlling and understanding the linguistic andsemantic parameters of a word and the overall text in question.Gleave makes it clear that his purpose is not to establish whether or notthere is such a thing as literal meaning but instead to demonstrate the importanceof its various concepts and the role they played for Muslim legal theoristsof all sects as understanding how a language system works is key to grasping“God’s meaning when he addresses (khiṭāb) his servants” (p. 35). The firsttwo chapters are useful introductions to concepts of literal meaning in legaltheory. The third chapter, where the author traces one of the early conceptsand uses of literal meaning in Qur’anic exegesis, delineates its early historicalemergence in Islamic thought. This is significant for Islamic law and legaltheory as later Muslim legal hermeneutics had “imprints” of the debates thattook place in scriptural exegesis where literal meaning was often identified(e.g., through establishing what a word “literally” meant by tracing its ...

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Abuarrah, Sufyan. "Literal meaning: A first step to meaning interpretation." Topics in Linguistics 19, no. 2 (December 1, 2018): 86–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/topling-2018-0012.

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Abstract Some traditional accounts view literal meaning (LM) as the central component in the process of meaning interpretation. This paper supports this view while adding that LM is the first but not the only piece of evidence available to the hearer of the speaker’s meaning. After critically evaluating examples from previous studies and my own examples, the study concludes that discourse comprehension is a sequential and graded process. To understand the significance of LM as evidence in the process of meaning understanding, the study has to reconsider the notion of evidence according to Relevance Theory (RT) and define the vigorously debated term of LM. The results from this study suggest that literal meaning is initial and context is subsequential; while both co-determine the speaker’s meaning in implicature, the latter enriches the speaker’s meaning into a higher order speech act in explicature.

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Kędzierska, Hanna, Joanna Błaszczak, Dorota Klimek-Jankowska, Piotr Gulgowski, and Wojciech Witkowski. "Idioms in Context: Evidence from a Time Cloze-Response Study." Zeitschrift für Slawistik 65, no. 4 (October 30, 2020): 535–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/slaw-2020-0025.

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Summary This article reports on two timed cloze-response experiments which examine the impact of context on idiom recognition. Study 1 presented participants with the beginnings of Polish VP idioms without any prior context. Cloze probabilities and response times for idiom continuations were measured to establish the idiom recognition point (IRP) for each idiom. In Study 2, we used the same idioms in two kinds of contexts: (i) supporting a figurative meaning and (ii) supporting a literal meaning. Cloze probability and response times were measured at the IRP and one word before and after it. The figurative meaning of idioms was automatically activated at the IRP independently of the type of context. Additionally, the figurative context did not move the IRP to an earlier position, whereas in the literal context the responses were significantly slower at the IRP as compared to the figurative context condition. Such a finding indicates that, irrespective of the literal context, the comprehenders automatically activated the figurative meaning of an idiom at the IRP, but they had to discard it later. The literal meaning was computed from the literal meanings of idiom constituents stored in idiom lexical representation, which was computationally costly.

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Turner, Nigel E., and Albert Katz. "The availability of conventional and of literal meaning during the comprehension of proverbs." Pragmatics and Cognition 5, no. 2 (January 1, 1997): 199–233. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.5.2.02tur.

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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.

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Sanders, John. "Divine Agency as Literal in Cognitive Linguistic Perspective: Response to “Conceiving God: Literal and Figurative Prompt for a More Tectonic Distinction” by Robert Masson." Open Theology 4, no. 1 (October 1, 2018): 489–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/opth-2018-0037.

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Abstract In “Conceiving God: Literal and Figurative Prompt for a More Tectonic Distinction” Robert Masson criticizes my claim that some concepts of God can be literal in the sense of a non-extended meaning as defined by cognitive linguists. He claims that all of our ideas for God can only be through extended meanings (what is typically called figurative language). He says that blending theory requires this conclusion. In response I make three points. First, I argue that this is not what cognitive linguistics requires. Second, that Masson fails to ever show that “God is an agent” is actually a single scope or double scope blend. Third, I suggest that behind our dispute are different metaphysical commitments regarding divine transcendence. Because I reject his understanding of divine transcendence and he fails to show that divine agency must be understood only in an extended sense, I conclude that religious believers can legitimately claim that some of their ideas of God are literal (non-extended meanings).

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Cacciari, Cristina. "Processing multiword idiomatic strings." Mental Lexicon 9, no. 2 (November 21, 2014): 267–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ml.9.2.05cac.

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Idioms are strings of words whose figurative meaning does not necessarily derive from that of the constituent parts. They belong to the vast and heterogeneous realm of multiword expressions, i.e. literal and non-literal word clusters whose representations are stored in semantic memory. This article provides an updated review of the psycholinguistic and electrophysiological literature on the processes underlying idiom comprehension with specific reference to the cues that lead to idiom recognition, to the syntactic and semantic behavior of idioms, to the relationships between literal compositionality and idiomatic meaning retrieval. Behavioral models of idiom comprehension are presented and discussed also with respect to the electrophysiological correlates of idiom and figurative language comprehension.

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Flanagan, B. "Revisiting the Contribution of Literal Meaning to Legal Meaning." Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 30, no. 2 (December 10, 2009): 255–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqp030.

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Mutammam, Mutammam, and Aisyah Zubaidah. "FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE OF METAPHORS IN THE HOLY QURAN." ALSINATUNA 1, no. 2 (March 7, 2017): 150. http://dx.doi.org/10.28918/alsinatuna.v1i2.792.

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As a system of communication, language has literal and figurative meanings. In the case of literal language, words are used to express meaning as defined, while in the case of figurative language, words are used to provide room for interpretation. A profound contemplation done by some linguists shows that Holy Qur’an uses two kinds of meanings, they are haqiqi (literal language) and majazi (figurative languages). In this case, metaphors or figurative language is used as a persuasive device to strengthen Muslims’ faith in God and convince disbelievers to believe in God.

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Recanati, François. "Predelli and García-Carpintero on Literal Meaning." Crítica (México D. F. En línea) 38, no. 112 (December 5, 2006): 69–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.22201/iifs.18704905e.2006.467.

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A summary of François Recanati’s book Literal Meaning (section 1), followed by his response to the critical reviews of the same book by Stefano Predelli (section 2) and Manuel García-Carpintero (section 3).

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Bezuidenhout, Anne, and J. Cooper Cutting. "Literal meaning, minimal propositions, and pragmatic processing." Journal of Pragmatics 34, no. 4 (April 2002): 433–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0378-2166(01)00042-x.

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Lo Guercio, Nicolás. "On the Literal Meaning of Proper Names." Análisis Filosófico 39, no. 1 (May 1, 2019): 27–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.36446/af.2019.311.

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One of the main arguments in favor of metalinguistic predicativism is the uniformity argument. The article discusses one of its premises, according to which the Being Called Condition gives the literal meaning of proper names. First, the uniformity argument is presented. Second, the article examines a challenge by Jeshion (2015a) and a recent response by Tayebi (2018). It is then argued that Tayebi’s response is unsound. Finally, two sets of facts are discussed, which provide independent evidence against the literal meaning thesis.

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Hansen, Nat. "J . L . A ustin and Literal Meaning." European Journal of Philosophy 22, no. 4 (January 19, 2012): 617–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0378.2011.00510.x.

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Loy, Jia E., Hannah Rohde, and Martin Corley. "Real-time social reasoning: the effect of disfluency on the meaning of some." Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science 3, no. 2 (September 21, 2019): 159–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s41809-019-00037-1.

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Abstract The scalar quantifier some is locally ambiguous between pragmatic (some-but-not-all) and literal (some-and-possibly-all) meanings. Although comprehenders typically favour an eventual pragmatic interpretation, debate persists regarding what factors influence interpretation, the time course of comprehension, and whether literal meaning takes precedence. We investigate how the interpretation of some depends on social reasoning derived from a speaker’s manner of delivery. Specifically, we test the effect of disfluency on the derivation of meaning in a context where hesitation may signal speaker embarrassment due to potential face-loss associated with the literal meaning of “some”. Participants $$(n=24)$$(n=24) viewed displays comprising two different snack quantities while hearing a recorded utterance describing how much a speaker had eaten. Critical utterances $$(n=16)$$(n=16) contained the quantifier some, half with a filled pause disfluency (“I ate <uh>, some oreos”). Participants’ eye and mouse movements showed (via empirical logit regressions) that fluent utterances yielded a bias toward a pragmatic interpretation, while disfluency attenuated this bias in favour of the literal meaning (where the speaker ate all the oreos). Crucially, this difference emerged rapidly post-onset of some. Taken together, our findings do not support a literal-first account of scalar comprehension, but rather, suggest that some is interpreted rapidly in a context-dependent manner.

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Dascal, Marcelo. "Una crítica reciente a la noción de significado literal." Crítica (México D. F. En línea) 18, no. 53 (December 8, 1986): 33–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.22201/iifs.18704905e.1986.606.

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Between two opposite conceptions about meaning, the traditional one of “literal meaning” and what I have called “Contextualism “ (Dascal, 1981), there is an alternative which I have dubbed “Moderate Literalism”, and defended in another place (Dascal, 1983). Contextualism as I understand it is the view that linguistic expressions lack “literal” meaning established by rules of language, and asserting that they get their meanings only as a function of the context within which they are used. My view of moderate literalism does not exclude literalism but it does modify this view taking off its excess weight. According to my view, the excessive demands made by the traditional conception on literal meaning are left aside, such as: it be sufficient to determine truth conditions and illocutionary force; that is always be a part of the message transmitted by the speaker; that it cannot be cancelled or neutralized in any context of use, etc. In this paper I do not intend to expound my proposal —this I have done elsewhere (Dascal, 1983)— but to discuss some recent criticisms against the notion of literal meaning. Gibbs (1984) tried to show that from the viewpoint of the psychology of language understanding, this notion does not play the role which had been attributed to it. A detailed discussion of the criticism will have as an outcome —according to me— that it is unnecessary to go from the traditional conception to radical contextualism, and that the notion of literal meaning, modified in due form, retains its validity and a crucial relevance for the psychological explanation of the process of understanding utterances. I will consider certain of Gibbs’ theoretical objections to the notion of literal meaning (section 2); afterwards I will take his empirical arguments (section 3), and conclude with a discussion of the implications that the author attributes to his criticism. [J.A. Robles]

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Rupp, Nathan Black. "The rise and fall of metaphor: A study in meaning and meaninglessness." Semiotica 2016, no. 213 (November 1, 2016): 419–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/sem-2015-0131.

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AbstractI propose the specific words used by a community define that community, yet at the same time the community is defined by those words. This ever-changing lexicon of communal metaphor is the storehouse of all the meanings and their usages used by a given group. By looking at the metaphors that permeate any communal language, we see that all language is metaphoric. With the use of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory, I investigate how new meanings enter our lexicon and become social meaning. This investigation also provides a closer understanding of “literal” meanings. We come to see they are just stale metaphors or neglected blendings devoid of potency. The process by which meanings are created illuminates how they become “literal.” Thus, showing us the danger that accompanies us in the modern, literal age.

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Ty, M. "The Riot of the Literal." Oxford Literary Review 42, no. 1 (July 2020): 76–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/olr.2020.0294.

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When Hortense Spillers speaks of ‘the hieroglyphics of the flesh’, she closes in on the lethally generative coincidence between racialized violence and symbolic production. Reading backward from her essay's last words, in which she incites an emergent praxis of naming, this study of ‘Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe’ moves with attention to the unsettling of figure and ground that Spillers's writing induces. In doing so, I draw out her insights into theoretical abstraction's complicity in extracting value from colonial slavery's dispossessing mark on black flesh. Kazimir Malevich's Black Square models this dynamic, insofar as the dereliction of those who are epidermally marked grounds, in eclipse, the freedom of ostensibly non-racial abstraction. For Spillers, a corresponding differential between the figural and literal becomes a site of intervention for discomposing grammars that codify asymmetrical laws of use, such that the forcible inscription of non-whites serves instrumentally as raw material for the predication of ‘Human’ meaning. Spillers's disruption of the tropological offers an occasion for working through theory's ‘death’ as a problematic re-centered on the intransigence of flesh to theoretical reflection; and, further, points the way to a feminist practice of reading, living, and dying that does not forsake racialised literality.

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Rommers, Joost, Ton Dijkstra, and Marcel Bastiaansen. "Context-dependent Semantic Processing in the Human Brain: Evidence from Idiom Comprehension." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 25, no. 5 (May 2013): 762–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00337.

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Language comprehension involves activating word meanings and integrating them with the sentence context. This study examined whether these routines are carried out even when they are theoretically unnecessary, namely, in the case of opaque idiomatic expressions, for which the literal word meanings are unrelated to the overall meaning of the expression. Predictable words in sentences were replaced by a semantically related or unrelated word. In literal sentences, this yielded previously established behavioral and electrophysiological signatures of semantic processing: semantic facilitation in lexical decision, a reduced N400 for semantically related relative to unrelated words, and a power increase in the gamma frequency band that was disrupted by semantic violations. However, the same manipulations in idioms yielded none of these effects. Instead, semantic violations elicited a late positivity in idioms. Moreover, gamma band power was lower in correct idioms than in correct literal sentences. It is argued that the brain's semantic expectancy and literal word meaning integration operations can, to some extent, be “switched off” when the context renders them unnecessary. Furthermore, the results lend support to models of idiom comprehension that involve unitary idiom representations.

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Lindley, Jori. "Literal versus exaggerated always and never." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21, no. 2 (August 29, 2016): 219–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.21.2.04lin.

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In this cross-genre study of the literal versus exaggerated meanings of the frequency adverbs always and never, I analyze three data sets: written and spoken language (academic speech, unscripted TV/radio dialog, and casual speech); local, national, and international news articles; and humanities, science-technology, and medical articles. For each genre, I calculate what I call the ‘Exaggeration Quotient’ (instances of always and never divided by instances of often or frequently and rarely or infrequently, respectively) and the rate of negation of always. Large Exaggeration Quotients and low negation rates were associated with informality, a pattern explicable in terms of specific aspects of informal language that motivate exaggeration, including perceived accountability for accuracy. In other words, formality is a proxy for certain features, goals, and expectations which are associated with certain genres and which affect how we use and understand always and never. This analysis supports a cognitive-functional, encyclopedic view of meaning.

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Cieślicka, Anna. "Literal salience in on-line processing of idiomatic expressions by second language learners." Second Language Research 22, no. 2 (April 2006): 115–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0267658306sr263oa.

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This article addresses the question of how second language (L2) learners understand idiomatic expressions in their second/foreign language and advances the proposition that literal meanings of idiom constituents enjoy processing priority over their figurative interpretations. This suggestion forms the core of the literal-salience resonant model of L2 idiom comprehension, whose major assumptions are outlined in the article. On the literal salience view, understanding L2 idioms entails an obligatory computation of the literal meanings of idiom constituent words, even if these idioms are embedded in a figurative context and if their idiomatic interpretation is well-known to L2 learners. The literal salience assumption was put to the test in a cross-modal lexical priming experiment with advanced Polish learners of English. The experiment showed more priming for visual targets related to literal meanings of idiom constituent words than for targets related figuratively to the metaphoric interpretation of the idiomatic phrase. This effect held true irrespective of whether the stimulus sentence contained a literal or a non-literal idiom.

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Stringaris, Argyris K., Nicholas C. Medford, Vincent Giampietro, Michael J. Brammer, and Anthony S. David. "Deriving meaning: Distinct neural mechanisms for metaphoric, literal, and non-meaningful sentences." Brain and Language 100, no. 2 (February 2007): 150–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2005.08.001.

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Graves, Michael. ""Judaizing" Christian Interpretations of the Prophets As Seen by Saint Jerome." Vigiliae Christianae 61, no. 2 (2007): 142–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157007207x195321.

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AbstractAmong the many differing interpretations reported by St. Jerome is the set ascribed to "our Judaizers," who are in reality Christian interpreters with whom Jerome disagrees. In his own exegesis of the prophets, Jerome accepts both the literal/historical meaning of the "Hebrews" (Jews) as it relates to Israel's past (Old Testament history), and the spiritual/allegorical meaning of the church as it relates to the present or future. The interpretations that Jerome regards as "Judaizing" are almost all attempts to assign a literal meaning to the future. It is this combination (literal and future) that Jerome rejects as "Judaizing."

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Simatupang, Ervina CM, and Ida Zuraida Supri. "COMPOUND WORDS THAT OCCUR DURING THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC COVID-19: A MORPHOSEMANTIC STUDY." English Review: Journal of English Education 8, no. 2 (July 2, 2020): 291. http://dx.doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2824.

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This study aims to analyse and examine closely the category of compound words that occur during the global pandemic COVID-19 and their type of meaning. The method used in carrying out the study was a descriptive analysis method. The data used were taken from the official website of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the �Your Questions Answered� section. The results demonstrated that there are two types of compound word found, namely compound nouns (67%) and compound verbs (33%). Besides, there are three types of meaning found, namely literal meaning (50%), semi-idiomatic meaning (33%), and idiomatic meaning (17%). Furthermore, in the category of compound nouns, the types of meaning that occur are literal meaning (50%), semi-idiomatic meaning (25%), and idiomatic meaning (25%). Meanwhile, the types of meaning that appear in the category of compound verbs are literal meaning (50%) and semi-idiomatic meaning (50%).

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Bonitatibus, Gary. "Comprehension Monitoring and the Apprehension of Literal Meaning." Child Development 59, no. 1 (February 1988): 60. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1130389.

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Weiland, Lydia, Ioana Hulpuş, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Wolfgang Effelsberg, and Laura Dietz. "Knowledge-rich image gist understanding beyond literal meaning." Data & Knowledge Engineering 117 (September 2018): 114–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2018.07.006.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Literal and non-literal meaning'

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