Gibbs: The Poetics of Mind (1994), comments on ch. 3

In the discussion of metaphors in the context of his chapter 3, Gibbs tries, somewhat confusedly, to situate himself within the psycholinguistic field that he surveys.

Handy References
One of the more interesting texts he mentions (p. 104) is an article by Dawn Blasko and Cynthia Connine (1993) which shows that familiarity decreases reading times for idioms. He also mentions (p. 103) a study by Richard J. Gerring and Alice F. Healy (1983) which shows that topic-vehicle ordering can affects reading times for at least some idioms.

Both of these findings are consistent with a keyword theory of idiom comprehension proposed by Cristina Cacciari and Patrizia Tabossi (1988). They are also consistent with accounts based gradual fossilization of conventional metaphors.

The Gibbsean Dichotomy
In the section entitled "Are literal and figurative language processing identical?", Gibbs attempts to introduce a distinction between a Gricean model and his own conceptual model. However, in the process, he ends up drawing a pretty crude caricature of the Gricean view while at the same time virtually turning his own theory into a notational variant of Gricean pragmatism.

The pragmatic theory that Gibbs places at the opposing end of the theoretical spectrum is one that postulates the following list of steps during comprehension, or something like it (p. 111):

Recover literal meaning
Recover metaphorical meaning
Recover idiomatic meaning
Recover ironic meaning
Recover indirect meaning

In contrast with this (ridiculous) theory, he places his own short list (p. 112):

Understand with respect to conceptual knowledge
Understand with respect to "common ground"

This might seem a little odd, especially because of his invocation of "common knowledge." It seems more than usually difficult to construct a theory having "common ground" as one of its legs without ending up in a copy of Gricean pragmatics.

Gibbs is Grice
This suspicion is confirmed when he later gives examples of how the two legs of his theory merge to form a particular act of comprehension:

Suppose Mary and David have an agreement in which Mary walks the dog on sunny days. By uttering The sky is blue, Mary would be communicating "It's your turn to walk the dog."

Suppose David is a kite flyer but has a great fear of being struck by lightning in the process. By uttering The sky is blue, Mary would be implicating "It's safe to fly your kite."

Suppose that David and Mary have in common the knowledge that their friend Betty plays golf on every sunny day. Mary's answer The sky is blue to David's question Where do you suppose Betty is? would imply "Betty is at the golf course."

In all three examples, utterance of The sky is blue prompts the listener to infer a further message that is recoverable only with reference to common ground. (p. 114)

So after all, the theory still just boils down to a reference to implicature, recovery, and common ground. There is no discussion of how Gibbs expects his new formulation of this old proposal to avoid the problems he have just gone through pages and pages to point out.

Clark: "Responding to Indirect Speech Acts" (1979)

I haven't read all of this (quite long) paper, but it's intriguing because it employs a quite unconventional methodology: Herbert Clark makes inferences about people's processing of indirect speech acts by looking at how they respond to them verbally, in particular whether they respond to the literal meaning, the conveyed meaning, or both.

The method is this: You decide on a stimulus questions, for instance Could you tell what time it is?; then you look up a dozen shops in the phone directory and call them; you ask them the question, and you record the exact wording of their response. Nice and simple.

The result that comes out of this exercise is that people frequently respond to both the literal and the derived meaning of a query, in that order. So for instance, you might ask someone Could you tell me what time it is? and that person might respond Yes, it's four o'clock.

Clark's conclusion from this data is that both the literal and the derived meaning of the question must enter the hearer's mind. I'm not sure whether that actually follows from the data (there are other competing explanations), but the observation that people actually say Yes is indeed worth taking seriously for a psycholinguistic theory.

Parrot Responses

One of the reasons that Clark has to doubt his own conclusion is that people in fact also respond Yes when the response to the literal request is in fact No. For instance, you may ask me Would you mind telling me what time it is?, and I may respond Yes, it's four o'clock. Only a very small minority responds with a No (p. 447-48).

This of course undermines Clark's use of the data slightly, since it may imply that people only respond Yes as a matter of verbal habit or perhaps to convey a more general sense of acceptance or affirmation—and not because they actually process the literal meaning of the request.

Clark himself explains the problem away by expanding the Gricean two-stage theory into a three-stage theory: He supposes that the question is gradually broken down according to the following progression:

1. Would you mind telling me what time it is?
2. Will you tell me what time it is?
3. Tell me what time it is!

In this way, he can explain the Yes as a response to an intermediate byproduct of the sentence processing (stage 2), while the other part of the answer is a response to the final product (stage 3).

That doesn't seem quite right—but OK, it's a theory.

A Reanalysis By Gibbs

Raymond Gibbs explains the same data by assuming that people include the Yes because it "is conventionally thought of as being polite" rather because they interpret the question literally as well as figuratively (Poetics of Mind, p. 89).

His support for this claim comes from an experiment in which he forced subjects into a literal reading of a question of the form Can't you ... ? This turns out to be difficult, and people take longer time to do this than to read the same question when it functions as an indirect request.

This data is quite dubious, both because the sentences are quite odd (Can't you be friendly?) and because the stories are quite badly written and don't unequivocally exclude an indirect request reading of the question in the so-called "literal" context.

However, Gibbs follows up with the following comment:

In general, people are biased toward the conventional interpretations of sentences even when these conventional meanings are nonliteral or figurative. Certain sentence forms, such as Can you … ? and May I … ?, conventionally seem to be used as indirect requests. Listeners' familiarity with these sentence forms, along with the context, helps them immediately comprehend the indirect meaning of these indirect requests. People may not automatically compute both the literal and indirect meanings of indirect speech acts. (Poetics of Mind, p. 91)

This seems more reasonable and in fact brings him much closer to the keyword theory of Cacciari and Tabossi (cf. Idioms (1995), chapters 2 and 11).

Conventionality and Frequency

The intuition that Gibbs has about the frequencies is not entirely unreasonable, although the story becomes a little bit more complex when we look at actual empirical frequencies. I've done a quick count based on the MICASE corpus and found the following estimates:

Sentence form	Literal	Indirect	Unclear	Other
Can you …?	17	17	12	9
Could you …?	12	23	13	18
May I …?	0	13	0	6
Would you mind …?	0	9	0	0

The numbers in the two first rows are based on a search in the "highly interactive" section of the corpus, and the numbers in the two last rows are based on a search in the entire corpus.

The phrase can you is so common in the corpus that I just picked 55 occurrences at random and categorized those. All other numbers are based on exhaustive search within the ranges specified above.

The category "Unclear" covers cases where both a question reading and a request reading are compatible with the phrase, for instance:

• can you remember that?
• can you cut it up so that everybody gets a piece?
• can you predict you know what it's gonna be?

The category "Other" covers less interesting search noise like i wanna finish this in May. i wanna finish in the set of May I …? sentences.

It's interesting that there are in fact a relatively large overlap in the direct and the indirect function of the sentences. These are the cases where there is a actual way out for the hearer of the request, such as Could you say anything about that? The existence of such real ambiguities are of course what motivates the use of indirect speech acts as politeness strategies in the first place.

Gibbs: The Poetics of Mind (1994), overview of ch. 3

Chapter 3 (pp. 80-119) is one of the more interesting ones in Gibbs' book. It seems to defend the theory that figurative meanings are (almost always) accessed faster and more easily than literal meanings.

If this is a correct representation of his views, they are indeed consistent with the fact that Gibbs wants the data to eventually point towards cognitive metaphor theory. He thus wants to make plausible the claims that figurative meanings to be connected to the literal meanings by hard-wired neural connections.

What's On the Table

Gibbs' theory of ambiguity resolution should be seen in contrast with two distinct alternatives:

1. Gibbs' own theory: People usually access the figurative meaning first, and only later and optionally the literal meaning. Possibly, the effort necessary to access a literal meaning "partly depends on the frequency and familiarity of these phrases" (p. 96).
2. The strictly discrete Gricean theory: Comprehension runs through a series of steps; one looks for a literal reading, evaluates its fitness, rejects this literal reading, looks for a different reading, evaluates this second reading, etc.
3. The lexical representation hypothesis: A number of mutually inhibitory readings are simultaneously activated, and one of them wins out (p. 93).

Probably no one has believed the strictly stepwise Gricean theory since the mid-1970s. The really decisive difference in this context is thus between a "horse race" theory (p. 93) and Gibbs' own "automatic" theory (cf. pp. 95-96).

Some Problems For Gibbs

Gibbs' theory is problematic mainly for two reasons:

First, it is conceptually confused, because the very idea of an idiom is a phrase is stable and frequently used. Gibbs has thus failed to give a definition of figurative language that would allow us to separate the effect of frequency imbalances from the effect of figurative thought.

Second, as Matthew McGlone has pointed out, there is something theoretically confused about the idea that source and target domains are tightly neurally connected. If there was really an automatic transfer of activation from temperature to emotions, it is unclear how we separate the two domains or arrive at different readings in different contexts. Nothing in Gibbs' theory explains how that is possible.

The Structure of the Chapter

The chapter contains the following sections:

1. Untitled introduction (p. 80)
2. The traditional view of figurative language understanding (pp. 81-84)
3. Psycholinguistic research (pp. 84-109)
1. Indirect speech acts (pp. 85-91)
2. Idioms (pp. 91-97)
3. Slang (pp. 97-98)
4. Proverbs (pp. 98-99)
5. Metaphor (pp. 99-106)
6. Metonomy (pp. 106-107)
7. Irony (pp. 107-109)
4. Are literal and figurative language processing identical? (pp. 109-115)
5. The processes and products of understanding (pp. 115-119)
6. Conclusion (p. 119)

The subsections on indirect speech acts, idioms, and metaphors contain references and discussions of much of the same evidence as Gibbs recycles in chapters 4 and 6.

For instance, the (very interesting) experiment by Cristina Cacciari and Patrizia Tabossi that he discusses on page 95 reappears on page 287 almost as if he was not aware that he had already presented it.

(By the way, based on the prose style, it seems probable that the discussion in chapter 6 was written before that in chapter 3).

Cacciari and Tabossi: "The Comprehension of Idioms" (1988)

In this paper, Cristina Cacciari and Patrizia Tabossi argue that our idiomatic reading of a phrase like shoot the breeze is triggered by a "key." The process by which we understand such phrases can consequently differ depending on the position of the key.

Although they don't give any examples, they probably have string like take the bull..., a silver spoon..., and make a fool... in mind when they talk about "keys."

Experimental Evidence

They support this theory with three priming experiments. These experiments show that:

• When the key is highly predictive of the idiom, and it occurs early in the phrase, the idiom is quickly and automatically activated, but the literal word meanings are not.
• When the key is more ambiguous or occurs late (or both), the opposite occurs: The idiom is not activated, but the word meanings are. However, this presupposes that the decision task that tests the activation levels is posed immediately after the stimulus.
• If one inserts a 300 ms delay before the decision task, though, both the idiom and the word meanings become active. This seems to suggest that the initial ambiguity associated with the late/weak key is resolved after the delay.

Recognizing Idioms From "Keys"

Cacciari and Tabossi don't formalize their notion of a "key," but it seems that it might be done in statistical terms. To illustrate that, take for instance the following idiomatic sentence:

• It is best to take the bull by the horns

This sentence contains a number of incomplete left-segments:

1. it ...
2. it is ...
3. its best ...
4. it is best to ... (etc.)

As we consider bigger and bigger left-segments, it becomes more and more probable that these incomplete sentences are going to be completed as the full sentence it is best to take the bull by the horns. This can be estimated by looking at the number of occurrences of the segment vs. whole sentence.

By thus comparing the predictive strength of the left-segment, we can get a sense of where the the uncertainty tips into certainty:

The numbers behind this graph are based on Google searches. For instance, the bar above the word bull shows the number of hits for it is best to take the bull divided by the number of hits for the whole sentence. The 'keyness' is just the difference between this statistic for the relevant word and its neighbor to the left.

As the picture clearly shows, the big jump occurs with the word bull. So we can expect an average English speaker to switch into "idiom mode" upon reaching that point in the sentence.

Conditional Probability Is Not Redundancy

Note this is different from the redundancy of each completion.

That would be another relevant statistic to base the concept of "keyness" on, but it would also require an estimate of the number of completions of each of these left-segments and their probabilities.

That's not a completely crazy thing to try to estimate based on some kind of language model, but it does require some corpus data that I don't have at hand right now.

Opaque Idioms

I just want to give a list of some of the Italian idioms that Cacciari and Tabossi provide, because they are such great examples of how much uncertainty we face when interpreting unknown idioms. Here's a list of their most striking items:

• He was born with the shirt (= born with a silver spoon in his mouth)
• That would have done him the skin (= killed him)
• He made a whole in the water (= did not succeed)
• She did a job with the feet (= badly)
• The project has gone to the mountain (= failed)
• The assets have been given bottom (= been depleted)
• She had the moon (= was in a bad mood)
• He was at the green (= broke)
• He made himself in four to succeed (= tried hard)
• She was left of salt (= struck dumb)