Literal meaning and figurative language

Scholars in many areas of cognitive science adhere to the belief that sentences have well-defined literal meanings. However, there are at least five ideas as to what constitutes the literal meaning of a sentence. These ideas include viewing literal meaning as conventional meaning, subject-matter meaning, nonmetaphorical meaning, truth-conditional meaning, and context-free meaning. These varying definitions of literal meaning contribute to the cluster of beliefs that researchers often assume without comment when they describe theories of linguistic understanding. The present studies assessed people's intuitions about the literal meanings of figurative language. Two experiments examined people's judgments of literality for different kinds of figurative discourse given different definitions of literal meaning. We found that people see figurative language in general as having different degrees of literality depending on their understanding of what constitutes literal meaning. Moreover, different kinds of figurative language are seen as being differentially literal depending on people's conception of literal meaning. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of literal meaning and for current models of figurative language understanding.