Gibbs, Raymond W.. 1993. Process and products in making sense of tropes. Book Chapter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 252-276
Notes
Starts off by mentioning the meaning of 'trope' as 'turn, twist' in Greek - which also provided names for the long and confusing list of tropesBut also adds that other scholars in the past gave figurative language a prominent place: Quintilian, Ramus and VicoContinues that metaphors have been studied more extensively in recent years to the neglect of other tropesWill argue that there doesn't need to be a separate cognitive process for each trope (irony, hyperbole, oxymoron, idiom, etc.) or even for tropes in General as opposed to other language usageThis chapter will be concerned with the role of common ground in understanding tropes: metonymy, irony, hyperbole and understatements, oxymora, idiomsRe process of understanding:"Listeners find tropes easy to understand precisely because much of their thinking is constrained by figurative processes." (p. 253)Implicature claims (Grice, Searle) of violation and interpretation shown to be psychologically falseReports on an experiment (Gerrig, 1989) where people read the sentence 'the horse race is the most popular event' at the end of a story about horse racing and snails racing on a horse took the same time to read (|cf. claims about blending) - thus context and background knowledge established as common ground are paramountIdioms - tacit conceptualization and metaphoric mapping helps make sense - 75% of agreement on underlying images