Figurative Language, Mental Imagery, and Pragmatics

Abstract

Many people report experiencing mental imagery (visual, auditory, and/or kinetic) when they comprehend verbal metaphors. The question whether imagery is merely an incidental side-effect of processes of metaphor understanding or plays a key role in comprehension remains unresolved, with diametrically opposed views expressed among psychologists, philosophers, and literary theorists. I survey a wide array of evidence (behavioral and neurocognitive) concerning the activation and use of imagery in language processing generally and metaphor processing in particular. I conclude that mental imagery is not an essential component in the comprehension of language, whether literal or metaphorical, but it is often automatically activated in the minds of hearers or readers as a by-product of their linguistic and pragmatic processes. Writers may exploit this fact and enhance the impact of imagery by producing extended and/or creative metaphors, so that, although not essential, imagistic effects can be as significant as propositional cognitive effects.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 125 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.