This paper uses eye-tracking while reading to examine Standard English speakers’ processing of sentences with two syntactic negations: a negative auxiliary and either a negative subject (e.g., Nothing didn’t fall from the shelf) or a negative object (e.g., She didn’t answer nothing in that interview). Sentences were read in Double Negation (DN; the ‘she answered something’ reading of she didn’t answer nothing) and Negative Concord (NC; the ‘she answered nothing’ reading of she didn’t answer nothing) biasing contexts. Despite the social stigma associated with NC, and linguistic assumptions that Standard English has a DN grammar, in which each syntactic negation necessarily contributes a semantic negation, our results show that Standard English speakers generate both NC and DN interpretations, and that their interpretation is affected by the syntactic structure of the negative sentence. Participants spent more time reading the critical sentence and rereading the context sentence when negative object sentences were paired with DN-biasing contexts and when negative subject sentences were paired with NC-biasing contexts. This suggests that, despite not producing NC, they find NC interpretations of negative object sentences easier to generate than DN interpretations. The results illustrate the utility of online measures when investigating socially stigmatized construction types.

Conceptual metaphor theory and other important theories in metaphor research are often experimentally tested by studying the effects of metaphorical frames on individuals’ reasoning. Metaphorical frames can be identified by at least two levels of analysis: words vs. concepts. Previous overviews of metaphorical-framing effects have mostly focused on metaphorical framing through words (metaphorical-words frames) rather than through concepts (metaphorical-concepts frames). This means that these overviews included only experimental studies that looked at variations in individual words instead of at the broader logic of messages. For this reason, we conducted a meta-analysis (k = 91, N = 34,783) to compare the persuasive impact of both types of metaphorical frames. Given that patterns of metaphor usage differ across discourse domains, and that effects may differ across modalities and discourse domains, we focused on one mode of presentation and one discourse domain only: verbal metaphorical framing in political discourse. Results showed that, compared to non-metaphorical frames, both metaphorical-words and metaphorical-concepts frames positively influenced beliefs and attitudes. Yet, these effects were larger for metaphorical-concepts frames. We therefore argue that future research should more explicitly describe and justify which level of analysis is chosen to examine the nature and effects of metaphorical framing.

Inference has long been acknowledged as a key aspect of comprehending narratives of all kinds, be they verbal discourse or visual narratives like comics and films. While both theoretical and empirical evidence points towards such inference generation in sequential images, most of these approaches remain at a fairly broad level. Few approaches have detailed the specific cues and constructions used to signal such inferences in the first place. This paper thereby outlines several specific entrenched constructions that motivate a reader to generate inference. These techniques include connections motivated by the morphology of visual affixes like speech balloons and thought bubbles, the omission of certain narrative categories, and the substitution of narrative categories for certain classes of panels. These mechanisms all invoke specific combinatorial structures (morphology, narrative) that mismatch with the elicited semantics, and can be generalized by a set of shared descriptive features. By detailing specific constructions, this paper aims to push the study of inference in visual narratives to be explicit about when and why meaning is ‘filled in’ by a reader, while drawing connections to inference generation in other modalities.

Metaphor and metonymy are likely the most common forms of non-literal language. As metaphor and metonymy differ conceptually and in how easy they are to comprehend, it seems likely that they also differ in their degree of non-literalness. They frequently occur in idioms which are foremost non-literal, fixed expressions. Given that non-literalness seems to be the defining criterion of what constitutes an idiom, it is striking that no study so far has focused specifically on differing non-literalness in idioms. It is unclear whether and how metaphoric and metonymic structures and their properties are perceived in idioms, given that the comprehension of idioms is driven by a number of other properties that are connected. This study divides idioms according to their metonymic or metaphoric structure and lets participants rate their non-literalness, familiarity, and transparency. It focuses on non-literalness as key property, finds it strongly connected to transparency, and to be the one key factor in predicting idiom type. Specifically, it reveals that metonymies are generally perceived as rather or even extremely literal, while metaphors are generally perceived as highly non-literal.

In this paper I present a framework for the conceptualization of languages based on the prototype theory of categorization proposed by Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues for natural semantic categories. It is motivated by research in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, where a high level of multilingualism in non-standardized varieties is the norm, making accurate description of languages, and thus analysis of multilingual discourse, problematic. I show that languages in this context can be conceived of as categories, of which linguistic features may be more or less prototypical members. Such an approach can form the basis for a more robust method of language description, integrating rich sociolinguistic data, and facilitating more nuanced analysis of multilingual discourse data.