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Herbert L. Colston & Albert N. Katz (eds.), Figurative language comprehension: Social and cultural influences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2006

Lionel Wee
Lionel Wee
Affiliation:
Department of English Language & Literature, National University of Singapore, ellweeha@nus.edu.sg
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Extract

Herbert L. Colston & Albert N. Katz (eds.), Figurative language comprehension: Social and cultural influences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xi, 347. Hb $89.95.

The field of psycholinguistics has a history of ignoring sociocultural factors and, to a lesser extent, figurative language. By choosing to focus on both, this book deals simultaneously with two relatively marginalized areas of language processing. This fact alone makes the book an important and welcome contribution. Excluding the first chapter (an overview by one of the editors, Herbert Colston), the book contains twelve articles that cover a range of figurative language phenomena and a host of sociocultural variables. The phenomena discussed include irony, metaphor, and proverbs; the variables include gender, occupational roles, and social status.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 35 , Issue 5 , November 2006 , pp. 757 - 760
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

Eckert, Penelope, & Rickford, John R. (2001) (eds.). Style and sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sealey, Alison, & Carter, Bob (2001). Social categories and sociolinguistics: Applying a realist approach. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 152:1–19.Google Scholar