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.
The articles are rather confusingly organized into four parts: “Sociocultural knowledge influences” (Part I), “Sociocultural phenomenological influences” (Part II), “Sociocultural processing influences” (Part III), and “New sociocultural influences” (Part IV). It is not clear how distinct “knowledge influences” are from “phenomenological influences,” nor why a discussion of metaphors in sign language (“Metaphors in sign language and sign language users: A window into relations of language and thought,” by Marc Marschark) should come under the rubric “New sociocultural influences.” In fact, Colston seems to admit as much when he states, “Categorizing the chapters into coherent, separable sections according to their content proved to be a very difficult task” (2). In that case, perhaps both he and his co-editor, Katz, should have exercised their editorial prerogative either to dispense with the section structure altogether, or to ask their contributors to focus their discussion more narrowly so as to facilitate organization. Regarding the latter option, Colston, in a discussion of the relationship between sociocultural variables and figurative language comprehension, describes three themes that he feels constitute important points for research (4). The first concerns the degree of dependence that exists between forms of language and specific kinds of contexts. Are there systematically different aspects of the context that are called on in figurative language comprehension? The second has to do with whether an all-encompassing theory provides the greatest explanatory power, or whether multiple theories are needed. Will it suffice to analyze figurative language comprehension using (mainly or wholly), say, the concept of implicatures, or would a more eclectic approach be more appropriate? Finally, if it does turn out that a more eclectic approach is indeed called for, then how are the different mechanisms and processes to be related to one another? Are the different mechanisms working independently, or is there a common processing space where they “merge”? Do we need to appeal to the notion of conflict resolution? These are interesting themes, and they could have been adopted usefully in organizing the various chapters, even as we acknowledge that some overlap of content is inevitable.
In addition to the organizational problem, the book also contains a fair number of typographical and other editorial errors, such as “an entity to be studied on it's own” (ix); “Dresher and Hornstein (1976: 330) Thus, one could start with …” (146). It is not clear if the word “Thus” begins a quote from Dresher and Hornstein because there is no punctuation before it; (iii) “each of which need not leads to enhanced persuasion” (149). There are references to “Giora, in press” in the text (187, 194, 203), but in the references we only find Giora (2003). The name Eckert is misspelled “Ekert” (189, 205).
The foregoing comments deal mainly with form. As far as substance is concerned, there are a number of theoretically significant contributions here, including those by Dale J. Barr & Boaz Keysar (“Making sense of how we make sense: The paradox of egocentricism in language use”), Albert N. Katz (“Discourse and sociocultural factors in understanding nonliteral language”), and Penny M. Pexman (“Social factors in the interpretation of verbal irony: The roles of speaker and listener characteristics”). Barr & Keysar make the interesting argument that people appeal to commonly shared knowledge far less than is supposed. For example, a speaker may expect an addressee to appreciate that she is being sarcastic even when the addressee cannot reasonably know that this is what the speaker intended. Thus, Barr & Keysar argue that people frequently disregard shared knowledge in favor of a more egocentric stance.
Katz proposes a processing model that treats sociocultural variables as constraints. The advantage of this model is that both sociocultural and linguistic variables are given a unified treatment as imposing constraints of varying intensities that need to be satisfied. Thus, Katz (203) suggests that knowledge of a speaker's occupation might lead the hearer to construe a phrase metaphorically, but this construal might be moderated by the hearer's own familiarity with the phrase itself.
Pexman explores the extent to which social cues such as the speaker's membership in certain social categories can influence the comprehension of ironic speech. Especially interesting is the developmental aspect of Pexman's work, which tries to take into account how individuals build up and modify their ideas about the relationship between personality traits and communicative intent. For example, Pexman (220, 225) suggests that younger children rely much more on personality traits in interpreting speaker's intent than do older children (7–8-year-olds). The latter have a growing appreciation that although such traits may be relevant, they are not strong predictors of how a speaker intends to be understood.
Individually, each of the chapters in the book demonstrates a high standard of argumentation, making for informative and engaging reading. My main grouse, however, concerns the extent to which all can be said to deal with the topic promised in the title: sociocultural influences on figurative language comprehension. On the one hand, the term “figurative language” is broadly interpreted so that contextual expressions (“Contextual expressions and common ground,” Richard J. Gerrig & William S. Horton) also count as figurative. I don't assume that such a broad interpretation is necessarily wrong, but surely only some contextual expressions are figurative (“Don't Walter Cronkite me!”), while others are questionably so (“a mountain vacation would cheer me”) (43–44). Thus, some explanation of why the phenomena being analyzed are pitched at the relatively general level of contextual expressions as opposed to the more specific level of, say, eponymous contextual expressions would have been welcome. And if all kinds of contextual expressions are processed similarly, then some discussion of the implications for any presumed distinction between figurative and nonfigurative language would have been appropriate. On the other hand, the chapter by Rachel Giora, Noga Balaban, Ofer Fein & Inbar Alkabets (“Explicit negation as positivity in disguise”) seems to deal with neither sociocultural factors nor figurative language. I actually enjoyed this chapter tremendously. Giora et al. provide very interesting evidence demonstrating that the use of negation does not lead to the suppression of the negated information (the “suppression hypothesis”). Instead, the negated information is retained (the “retention hypothesis”) and influences the resulting interpretation, so that “the outcome is a mitigated product involving both the negativity of the negation marker and also the expressed meaning of the negated item” (239). However, what the chapter does in the end is to make a case for the role of negation in language comprehension. What this has to do with the specific topic of figurative language and sociocultural factors is left unexplored.
I want to end with the observation that almost all of the authors in this book treat sociocultural influences as variables that are discretely identifiable to some extent. This is perhaps to be expected of a volume that boldly addresses issues relatively ignored in much of psycholinguistics. But I would hope that as more work is undertaken in this area, there will be attempts to pay greater attention to more recent works in social theory that treat the notions of, say, gender, class, or ethnicity as complex constructions where the criteria for category membership are not just observer-dependent but based on norms that often are not fully explicable, even by those doing the categorizing. I have in mind the works of theorists as varied as Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Judith Butler. Something of this sort is already happening in sociolinguistic theorizing, where there are attempts to move beyond the variationist paradigm (Eckert & Rickford 2001, Sealey & Carter 2001). It would therefore be nice if in trying to account for sociocultural influences on language processing, advances in psycholinguistics were not held back by outdated social theorizing.
