# UNDERSTANDING AND USING NON-LITERAL LANGUAGE

> **NIH NIH R01** · PRINCETON UNIVERSITY · 1993 · $108,700

## Abstract

There are two general sources of ambiguity in ordinary discourse. The
first involves alternative interpretations that arise from either lexical
or syntactic ambiguity. The second arises from the nature of discourse
itself; How do people use the meanings of words, the meanings of
sentences and contextual information to infer speakers intentions? The
focus is on how people combine linguistic meanings with contextual
information to understand three general types of language use: (1)
Irony/sarcasm: What makes an utterance ironic or sarcastic? A theory is
proposed that literal meanings are employed to remind listeners of the
objects of irony and sarcasm in order to communicate the speaker's
attitude toward those objects. The theory is intended to account for both
comprehension and production. (2) Metaphors: A new theory of metaphor
comprehension is proposed whereby metaphors function as novel re-
categorizations of concepts. A series of experiments is planned to
investigate the nature of such novel categorizations and to explore the
reciprocal relations between similarity and classification processes. (3)
Idioms of varying types.

A variety of methods and paradigms will be utilized: verification
latency, comprehension latency, cross-modal priming, paragraph and
sentence completion and judgments of various dimensions of ironical,
metaphoric and idiomatic language use. The overall goal is to discover
how word and sentence meanings interact with contextual information to
produce discourse comprehension. This is a necessary step towards an
adequate understanding of language use and comprehension in general,
which in turn is required for an understanding of language pathologies.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 2199715
- **Project number:** 5R01HD025826-05
- **Recipient organization:** PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
- **SAM.gov UEI:** NJ1YPQXQG7U5
- **Principal Investigator:** SAM GLUCKSBERG
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 1993
- **Award amount:** $108,700
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 1989-09-01 → 1995-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/2199715

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 2199715, UNDERSTANDING AND USING NON-LITERAL LANGUAGE (5R01HD025826-05). Retrieved via MORVS 2026-10-25 from https://api.morvs.ai/grant/nih/2199715. Licensed CC0.

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