The DOI matches its Crossref record; 86 of the 86 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Literal Meaning and Psychological Theory*
Open accessAbstract
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 of these positions meet the demands of a psychological theory of language understanding. Sentences do not have well‐defined literal meanings, regardless of whether these are determined in light of a set of background assumptions. Moreover, the putative literal meanings of sentences do not contribute in systematic ways toward the understanding of speakers' utterance meanings. These observations suggest that the distinctions between literal and metaphoric meanings, and between semantics and pragmatics, have little psychological validity.
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Cites
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Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind
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A FRAMEWORK FOR REPRESENTING KNOWLEDGE
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The psychology of computer vision
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Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures
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Cited by
Thagard, P. (1989) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x00057046 · Cited by 1,043
A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and implicated
Gibbs Jr., R. W. (2002) · Journal of Pragmatics · doi:10.1016/s0378-2166(01)00046-7 · Cited by 549
Effects of familiarity and aptness on metaphor processing.
Blasko, D. G., & Connine, C. M. (1993) · Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition · doi:10.1037//0278-7393.19.2.295 · Cited by 411
Processing of Idioms by L2 Learners of English
Cooper, T. C. (1999) · TESOL Quarterly · doi:10.2307/3587719 · Cited by 318
Rubio Fernandez, P. (2007) · Journal of Semantics · doi:10.1093/jos/ffm006 · Cited by 275
Metadata
- Authors
- Gibbs, R. W.
- Venue
- Cognitive Science
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1984-07
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 275-304
- ISSN
- 0364-0213 (ISSN-L)
- 1551-6709
- OpenAlex
- W2037101809
- Cited by
- 379
- References
- 86
- FWCI
- 95.18
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
