Raymond W Gibbs
Biographic Data
| ID | 87727 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Raymond W Gibbs |
| GIVEN NAMES | Raymond W |
| FAMILY NAME | Gibbs |
| SIGNATURE | GIBBS R W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2038-223X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 99 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 576 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 97 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
When do metaphors come to mind? A cognitive appraisal view of metaphor emergence
Should offensive metaphors be censored
This article offers my personal assessment of the recent efforts to censor certain metaphors in higher education within the United States. Many universities have created extensive speech codes that censor various metaphorical words and phrases for their potential harm, especially for possibly being offensive to different individuals and marginalized communities. I discuss some of the problems with these efforts and offer a brief defense of the im…
What's figurative about figurative language
How metaphors shape the particularities of illness and healing experiences
Metaphors are frequently seen in individuals' descriptions of their illness and healing experiences. These figurative phrases are not ornamental, or distracting, but often reveal the particularities of what it is like to be ill or healing. Culture plays a big role in shaping the particular metaphors employed to express one's thoughts about illness and different healing rituals. However, a significant reason why metaphor emerges in illness narrati…
How We Resist Metaphors
Most people love metaphor, but we still sometimes find ourselves resisting their presence or meanings for various reasons. We resist metaphors both as a general strategy (e.g., “Metaphors are meaningless” or “Mixed metaphor are incoherent”), and as a response to some metaphors in very specific situational and discourse contexts (e.g., “I do not like the idea that my cancer treatment is seen as a war against my body”). People resist metaphors they…
“Holy Cow, My Irony Detector Just Exploded!” Calling Out Irony During The Coronavirus Pandemic
One of the compelling events during the 2020 spring coronavirus pandemic is the extent to which people call-out "irony" in regard to the speech and actions of other individuals, as well as, in some cases, their own behaviors. These frequent call-outs are evidence of the cognitive realization of some discrepancy between prior expectations and unfolding reality, but also reveal people's communicative efforts to persuade others to adopt a negative v…
My Great Life with “Metaphor and Symbol”
Metaphors in the flesh
When athletes make significant plays in sporting competitions, such as scoring a goal in soccer, a touchdown in American football, they often immediately express their joy by performing some bodily action for others to see and understand. Many sports celebrations are staged pantomimes that express metaphorical meanings as a part of athletes’ pretending to perform certain source-path-goal sequences of action from other competitive events. This art…
Embodied Imagination in Rites of Passage
Metaphor as Dynamical–Ecological Performance
The revolution in metaphor studies has revealed the motivating presence of underlying conceptual metaphors in people’s use and understanding of metaphorical language and gesture. Metaphorical expression is typically viewed now as bodily enactment of mentally represented metaphorical concepts. My aim in this article is to advance the idea that metaphorical performances are always part of dynamical, ecological cognition and must always be character…
Diving into the wreck
Metaphor Wars
The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. We marvel at the creative dexterity of gifted speakers and writers for their special talents in both thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in vivid, poetic forms. Yet metaphors may not only be special communicative devices, but a fundamental part of everyday cognition in the form of 'conceptual metap…
Metaphor and the automatic mind
When people produce or understand verbal metaphors, and metaphoric gestures, do they do so automatically or with conscious deliberation? Metaphor scholars widely recognize that the answer to this question depends on several factors, including the specific kind of metaphor that was produced or understood. But many scholars assume that the automatic use of metaphor involves the simple retrieval of its figurative meaning, without having to draw any …
Money talks because people move
Metaphor plays a major role in the ways people speak and write about money and other economic concepts. One long-standing belief is that most verbal metaphors are clichéd or dead, and do not evoke active metaphoric thinking. However, research in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science demonstrates how verbal metaphors about money are pervasive in discourse, and emerge from vitally alive metaphoric concepts, most of which are rooted in pervasi…
Taking metaphor studies back to the Stone Age
One recent trend in metaphor studies is to deny the possibility that most verbal metaphors really convey metaphoric meanings via cross-domain mappings. Instead, only a small number of verbal metaphors, those presumably produced “deliberately” and “consciously,” ever alert listeners or readers to draw cross-domain inferences. Xu, Zhang, and Wu (2016. Enlarging the scope of metaphor studies
The allegorical character of political metaphors in discourse
When people talk about politics, they often employ metaphors, sometimes in extended sequences, in which a metaphorical idea is referred to across a larger segment of discourse (e.g., talk about political debates as wars, boxing matches, or games of chess). Empirical studies from psychology indicate that, at least in some cases, metaphors can have great persuasive value. My primary claim in this article is that many political metaphors in discours…
Does deliberate metaphor theory have a future
Do pragmatic signals affect conventional metaphor understanding? A failed test of deliberate metaphor theory
Where is the humor in verbal irony
Irony is often related to humor, both in spoken and written language. One possibility is that humor arises once people reconcile the incongruity between what speakers say and imply when using irony. Humor automatically emerges in these cases given the release of tension following a momentary sense of disparity. Our claim is that this proposal does not capture many of the dynamic complexities in real-world ironic discourse. We describe psychologic…
Metaphoric cognition as social activity
Metaphoric thought is often viewed as a property of individual minds that is quite separate from people’s social, communicative actions with metaphoric language and gesture. My goal in this article is to argue that metaphoric cognition is fundamentally linked to human social activities. I defend this idea by focusing not only on metaphor use in overt communicative situations, but by suggesting ways that individual metaphoric cognition is implicit…
Crazy creative metaphors
This article presents an analysis of public interviews with the American actor Charlie Sheen during a difficult time in his life when he appeared to be speaking and acting crazy. Sheen’s metaphoric descriptions of his life mostly referred to common conventional metaphoric concepts. However, closer examination of the metaphoric discourse revealed that he characterized his life and thoughts using various allegorical themes, most of which relate to …
Walking the Walk While Thinking About the Talk
The real complexities of psycholinguistic research on metaphor
No need for instinct
Language serves many purposes in our individual lives and our varied interpersonal interactions. Daniel Everett’s claim that language primarily emerges from an “interactional instinct” and not a classic “language instinct” gives proper weight to the importance of coordinated communication in meeting our adaptive needs. Yet the argument that language is a “cultural tool”, motivated by an underlying “instinct”, does not adequately explain the compl…
Temporal Unfolding of Conceptual Metaphoric Experience
Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) has become prominent in metaphor scholarship because of its explanation of the relations between people's metaphoric thoughts and their use of metaphoric discourse. Our aim in this article is to explore the temporal characteristics of how conceptual metaphors shape verbal metaphor use. We argue that cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics mostly adopt simplistic, and psychologically implausible, views of how c…
Literal Meaning and Psychological Theory
This paper evaluates the psychological status of literal meaning. Most linguistic and philosophical theories assume that sentences have well-specified literal meanings which represent the meaning of a sentence independent of context. Recent debate on this issue has centered on whether literal meaning can be equated with context-free meaning, or whether a sentence's literal meaning is determined only given a set of background assumptions. Neither …
Metaphor is grounded in embodied experience
A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and implicated
Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor Theory
A major revolution in the study of metaphor occurred 30 years ago with the introduction of "conceptual metaphor theory" (CMT). Unlike previous theories of metaphor and metaphorical meaning, CMT proposed that metaphor is not just an aspect of language, but a fundamental part of human thought. Indeed, most metaphorical language arises from preexisting patterns of metaphorical thought or conceptual metaphors. This article provides an evaluation of t…
Psychological aspects of irony understanding
Complementary perspectives on metaphor
Metaphor
Contextual effects in understanding indirect requests∗
Subjects were presented with sentences like "Must you open the window?" either embedded within a story context or as an isolated sentence. Within the story context, the sentence could have its literal meaning, "Is it necessary that you open the window?" or its indirect or conveyed meaning, "Do not open the window." Subjects gave comprehension responses and paraphrase judgments for the sentences. In a story context subjects take longer to understa…
Mutual knowledge and the psychology of conversational inference
Emotional Reactions to Verbal Irony
We report the findings of 3 studies looking at people's emotional reactions to different kinds of ironic language (e.g., irony, sarcasm, overstatement, understatement, satire, rhetorical questions, and nonironic statements). The first experiment instructed the participants to rate their own emotional reaction, the second to rate the emotional state of the speaker, and the third to rate how the participants thought the speaker wished them to feel.…
The cognitive psychological reality of image schemas and their transformations
What proverb understanding reveals about how people think
The ability to understand proverbial sayings, such as a rolling stone gathers no moss, has been of great interest to researchers in many areas of psychology. Most psychologists assume that understanding the figurative meanings of proverbs requires various kinds of higher order cognitive abilities. The authors review the findings on proverb interpretation to examine the question of what proverb use and understanding reveals about the ways normal a…
Skating on thin ice
The question of whether people always analyze the literal meanings of idiomatic expressions, such as You can let the cat out of the bag, (meaning “You can reveal the secret”) was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1 subjects read stories that ended with either literal or nonliteral uses of idomatic expressions. After reading each story, subjects made a sentence classification judgment for sentences that could be either a literal, nonliter…
Where is the humor in verbal irony
Irony is often related to humor, both in spoken and written language. One possibility is that humor arises once people reconcile the incongruity between what speakers say and imply when using irony. Humor automatically emerges in these cases given the release of tension following a momentary sense of disparity. Our claim is that this proposal does not capture many of the dynamic complexities in real-world ironic discourse. We describe psychologic…
Are ironic acts deliberate
Processing idioms with multiple meanings
Do pragmatic signals affect conventional metaphor understanding? A failed test of deliberate metaphor theory
Authorial intentions and metaphor comprehension
Psycholinguistic studies on the conceptual basis of idiomaticity
Why You Can't Kick the Bucket as You Slowly Die
Why Boys will be boys and girls will be girls
Inferring meanings that are not intended
Most cases of verbal irony involve a situation in which a speaker says one thing and deliberately intends for his or her listener to infer an ironic meaning (e.g., “What lovely weather!” spoken in the midst of a downpour). However, there are occasions when listeners infer ironic meanings for utterances even though speakers do not intend their utterances to convey irony. For example, listeners may infer that the expression “I would never be involv…
Does deliberate metaphor theory have a future
Walking the Walk While Thinking About the Talk
Conversational sequences and preference for indirect speech acts
Two experiments are reported examining people's preferences for indirect speech acts in making requests in conversation. We investigated the effect of pre‐requests (e.g., “Do you sell Marlboros?”) which prepares the addressee for an upcoming request, (e.g., “I'll take two packs”). We hypothesized that pre‐requests function to remove any obstacles to compliance for the addressee and predicted that speakers would produce different kinds of request …
Contextual effects in understanding indirect requests∗
Subjects were presented with sentences like "Must you open the window?" either embedded within a story context or as an isolated sentence. Within the story context, the sentence could have its literal meaning, "Is it necessary that you open the window?" or its indirect or conveyed meaning, "Do not open the window." Subjects gave comprehension responses and paraphrase judgments for the sentences. In a story context subjects take longer to understa…
Spilling the beans on understanding and memory for idioms in conversation
The concept of scripts in understanding stories
Subjects listened to a series of stories based on everyday activities, such as taking a shower, which in Schank's (1975a,b) terminology have familiar scripts. Script implications, like getting undressed, either were made explicit in the story or were left implicit. Unpredictable script variables, such as the temperature of the water, were specified. On an immediate sentence recognition test, subjects detected changes in the script variables more …
Literal Meaning and Psychological Theory
This paper evaluates the psychological status of literal meaning. Most linguistic and philosophical theories assume that sentences have well-specified literal meanings which represent the meaning of a sentence independent of context. Recent debate on this issue has centered on whether literal meaning can be equated with context-free meaning, or whether a sentence's literal meaning is determined only given a set of background assumptions. Neither …
Getting the Hang of American Slang
Three experiments examined people's understanding and memory for slang metaphors. Experiment 1 showed that people processed slang metaphors, like He's on a trip (meaning "He's using drugs"), faster than they comprehended either literal uses of the same sentences, or non-slang equivalents, like He's using drugs. This suggests that slang metaphors can be understood without having to analyze the literal meanings of these expressions before determini…
On the process of understanding idioms
On the psycholinguistics of sarcasm.
Skating on thin ice
The question of whether people always analyze the literal meanings of idiomatic expressions, such as You can let the cat out of the bag, (meaning “You can reveal the secret”) was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1 subjects read stories that ended with either literal or nonliteral uses of idomatic expressions. After reading each story, subjects made a sentence classification judgment for sentences that could be either a literal, nonliter…
Linguistic factors in children's understanding of idioms
This study examined the effect of two linguistic factors on children's understanding of idioms. Kindergarten, first, third and fourth graders listened to idiomatic expressions either alone or at the end of short story contexts. Their task was to explain verbally the intended meanings of these idioms and then to choose the correct idiomatic interpretations of these phrases. The results showed that in the presence of supporting context younger chil…
Pragmatic factors in making and understanding promises
Within his theory of speech acts, Searle (1965, 1969) has suggested that certain conditions must hold true for a promise to be successfully made. These include: (a) that the speaker's utterance place him or her under an obligation to fulfill the promise because it is conventionally recognized as a promise; (b) that promises can be made only in situations where the addressee prefers that the speaker do the action promised; and (c) that the promise…
Processing idioms with multiple meanings
Mutual knowledge and the psychology of conversational inference
Beyond the Lexicon
We describe a number of communicative goals that lead speakers to produce creative utterances. We argue that speakers produce utterances that incorporate, for example, metaphors, lexical innovations, or indirectness, because they wish to express their intended meanings as accurately as their language allows. Speakers, we suggest, also create new meanings because of the social demands on them. Finally, we discuss the consequences of creativity for…
Conversational sequences and preference for indirect speech acts
Two experiments are reported examining people's preferences for indirect speech acts in making requests in conversation. We investigated the effect of pre‐requests (e.g., “Do you sell Marlboros?”) which prepares the addressee for an upcoming request, (e.g., “I'll take two packs”). We hypothesized that pre‐requests function to remove any obstacles to compliance for the addressee and predicted that speakers would produce different kinds of request …
Common Ground in Asking and Understanding Questions
An important part of the context speakers and listeners use in conversation is their “common ground” — their mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions. This paper reports the findings of two experiments that investigated the role of common ground information in asking and understanding questions. Subjects read stories containing conversations that depicted different degrees of common ground information between the characters who served as speake…
Psycholinguistic studies on the syntactic behavior of idioms
How to kick the bucket and not decompose
How Context Makes Metaphor Comprehension Seem 'Special'
Psycholinguistic research has shown that, with appropriate context, people take no longer to understand metaphors than to understand semantically comparable literal language. This finding is often taken to suggest that identical mental processes drive the comprehension of both literal and metaphorical utterances. We suggest that this claim does not necessarily follow from the experimental results. Various masking processes could foster the "incor…
Idioms and mental imagery
Psycholinguistic studies on the conceptual basis of idiomaticity
Why Boys will be boys and girls will be girls
Inferring the interpretation of attributive and referential definite descriptions
Three experiments are presented that investigate how people understand definite descriptions, such as The woman who can sing this song will get the job. The woman may refer to a specific woman, the referential use, or it may refer to any woman who fills the description who can sing this song, the attributive use. Experiment 1 showed that people can readily distinguish between the referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions in variou…
Authorial intentions and metaphor comprehension
Psychological aspects of irony understanding
When Is Metaphor? The Idea of Understanding in Theories of Metaphor
My purpose in this article is to describe how and why theories of metaphor vary in the ways they do. I argue that theories of metaphor differ precisely because they emphasize different temporal stages in the process of understanding metaphorical expressions. The different temporal points at which theories propose that a metaphor has been understood, ranging from the first milliseconds of processing to extended, reflective analysis, distinguish ri…
Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (90 works) · Psychology (87 works) · Linguistics (83 works) · Philosophy (72 works) · Metaphor (47 works) · Computer Science (43 works) · Cognition (38 works) · Epistemology (37 works) · Cognitive science (35 works) · Action Observation and Synchronization (28 works)