The Graded Salience Hypothesis

Through the graded salience hypothesis, Giora (2003) proposes that whether a meaning is literal or figurative is not the deciding factor in when or if it is activated. Instead, it is

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the meaning’s salience which determines its activation. Thus, comprehension of a lexical item proceeds according to two mechanisms. The bottom-up mechanism is sensitive to linguistic information, while the top-down mechanism is sensitive to both linguistic and extralinguistic contextual knowledge. The graded salience hypothesis assumes that ‘more salient meanings – coded meanings foremost on our mind due to conventionality, frequency, familiarity or prototypicality – are accessed faster than and reach sufficient levels of activation before less salient ones’ (Giora, 2003: 10). This has significant implications for metaphor processing, as it depends heavily on the listener’s own experience of the word.

As a top-down mechanism, context also has an important role to play in aiding listeners or readers to derive the appropriate meaning, although to do so also requires the appropriate meaning to be sufficiently accessible, or salient, in the listener or reader’s mind. For example, a computer expert will probably immediately access the technological meaning of the word window in a text about computers, whereas a novice may activate the literal meaning first, as this meaning would be more accessible.

Context may also prime the reader, making it easier for them to activate a particular meaning of a word. For example, the word money in the phrase ‘I needed money, so I went to the bank’ may facilitate activation of the ‘financial institution’ meaning of bank (Giora, 2003: 22). However, the graded salience hypothesis claims that the two mechanisms run in parallel, with salient meanings being processed regardless of contextual information.

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As it relates specifically to metaphor processing, the Graded Salience Hypothesis

predicts that, given a similarly supportive context, literal and figurative interpretations will involve similar processes in case they are similarly salient (i.e., coded in the mental lexicon and enjoying similar familiarity, frequency, conventionality, or prototypicality) (Giora, 2003: 105)

Experimental evidence in support of the graded salience hypothesis has been proposed through various methods. In Giora and Fein’s (1999) study, participants’ reading times were recorded as they read familiar and unfamiliar metaphors, each in both metaphorically biasing and literally biasing contexts. They hypothesised that in the case of familiar metaphors, both the literal and the figurative interpretations would be activated in both types of context, due to the fact that both interpretations had a high degree of salience. The results bore out this hypothesis, as there was no significant difference in reading time between the contexts. Response time experiments can also provide insights into language processing. For example, the graded salience hypothesis would predict that participants asked to decide whether a letter string was a word would react faster to words related to salient meanings, given a supportive context (Giora, 2003). This would be irrespective of whether these words were metaphorical or literal due to the equal salience of both meanings. Blasko and Connine’s (1993) study, introduced above, showed how both literal and figurative senses were activated, due to the participants’ ability to immediately discern both literally and metaphorically related target letter strings as words. As both senses were salient due to the conventional nature of the metaphors used, this study reinforced the theory that salient meanings are always activated regardless of their literal or metaphorical status.

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However, one potential problem with the study was due to the fact that the literal target words in the metaphorical expressions could have primed the metaphorically-related test words rather than the metaphor itself (Giora, 2003). For example, one familiar metaphor given to participants was freedom is truth, after which they were given the words liberty as a metaphorically related target, honesty as a literally related target, and inaugural as a control (Blasko and Connine, 1993: 307). The participants’

ability to discern the metaphorically related target string as a word may not have been an indicator of metaphorical meaning activation following their encounter with the initial phrase, but of priming following the use of the word freedom.

Nonetheless, further experiments have provided similar results without such a drawback.

Williams (1992) administered lexical decision tasks to participants using polysemous adjectives. These often corresponded to conventional metaphors: the prime firm, for example, had as its targets its literal meaning solid and its metaphorical meaning strict (Williams, 1992: 198). Each adjective was presented in a context that favoured a literal or a metaphorical interpretation. Participants were presented with all but the last four words of the sentence, whereupon they pressed a button to be shown the last four words, one at a time, for 250 milliseconds each. The target word was then shown in capital letters, and the time participants took to decide whether it was a word was measured. For example, participants would be shown a sentence such as ‘The couple wanted a bed that was firm’ followed by the target word STRICT (a ‘noncentral’, or metaphorical, target related to the prime, firm) (Williams, 1992: 198). The experiment was then repeated with delays of 750 and 1100 milliseconds. ‘Polysemous adjectives were found to prime targets related to their contextually irrelevant uses even at delays

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of up to 850 msec after offset’ (Williams, 1992: 202), meaning that the salient meanings of conventional metaphors were activated straight away, irrespective of context.

It should also be noted at this point that multiword phrases can also have greater or lesser degrees of salience. The idiomatic meanings of formulaic sequences such as kick the bucket have been shown to be activated faster when the context favours an idiomatic interpretation (Gibbs, 1980). This suggests that some phrases may have salient meanings that are activated alongside the meanings of their constituent parts.

This has implications for metaphor use, as once a metaphorical collocation is acquired,

‘the salience of the collocation is at least as high as the salience of the collocates when viewed independently’, implying that metaphoricity may become less salient to a language user when it occurs in a conventional collocation (Philip, 2011: 25).