On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language

Extract

Rachel Giora, On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. ix, 259. Hb $55.

The goal of this book is to explore the extent to which salient meanings – meanings that are decoded in our mental lexicon and foremost on our mind – affect our speech production and comprehension. “It aims to shed light, primarily empirically, on how, in addition to contextual information, salient meanings and senses of words and fixed expressions shape our linguistic behavior” (p. 9). According to Rachel Giora's graded salience hypothesis, salient meanings are more accessible than less salient ones. Of the multiple meanings of a given word or expression, the most salient one, which can be either literal or figurative, is always activated first regardless of context.