Page 493 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

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A speech act is created when speaker/writer S makes an utterance U to hearer/reader H in context C. To understand U, H constructs a mental model of the discourse world that s/he perceives S to be speaking of; in doing so, H uses not only knowledge of lang- uage, but knowledge of all kinds. When communi- cating, S relies on the fact that H's understanding is an active, not a passive process. This entry looks at the interpretation of nonliteral speech acts, and the conclusion is that nonliterally meant statements are interpreted in essentially the same way as literal ones.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) made us aware that figurative language is not closeted in poetry, but per- vades everyday speech. We use figures to be vivid, e.g., in animal descriptions of people as dog, bitch, mouse; exaggerations like Your bedroom's a pigsty; charac- terizing someone stupid as two cans short of a six- pack; describing a short person as vertically chal- lenged; Barbara Bush describing Geraldine Ferraro as something that rhymes with rich; saying of something comic It killed me. Nonliteral language concretizes the abstract: saying Language is a vehicle of com- munication; describing wine or a piece of music as lively. We use nonliteral language to relate the unknown to a known, e.g., Saussure's (1974:22, 88, 110) analogy between language and a game of chess.
When S says It killed me s/he cannot mean it liter- ally, because dead people cannot make statements. H therefore infers that S is exaggerating and invoking the idiomatic sense 'I almost died laughing at it.' This account is feasible because every possible meaning is initially activated no matter how contextually absurd, but the context then suppressses all but the most likely interpretation (cf. Gernsbacher 1990).
Suppose, though, that Sue says and literally means Maxine is a real dog; using 'dog' as a dysphemism for a woman bone ugly despite overexpenditure of time and money on her appearance. Sue is exploiting the ambiguity of the word dog and being nonliteral at the lexical and therefore locutionary level; at the illo- cutionary level her statement of opinion is doubtless true (the same can be said of Barbara Bush vis-a-vis Geraldine Ferraro, cf. Allan 1992). How does H know that Sue does not mean 'Maxine is a canine animal?' One clue would be the intonation over 'real dog': a high-fall on 'real,' a possible disjuncture, and then low-fall on 'dog' would indicate 'canine animal'; on the other hand a level stress on 'real' and a high-fall on 'dog' implies the dysphemism. Furthermore, if H believes the referent Maxine is human not canine, then Sue is either deluded or using the dysphemism.
It is often assumed that in assigning meaning, H makes an initial presumption of literalness: If S utters
Speech Acts: Literal and Nonliteral K.Allan
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