September 14, 1994 Contact: Jennifer McNulty (408/459-2495)

UC SANTA CRUZ PSYCHOLOGIST SAYS SARCASM, METAPHOR, SLANG, AND OTHER FORMS OF FIGURATIVE SPEECH REVEAL THE POETIC WAY THE MIND WORKS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--When John Lennon proclaimed in 1964 that the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus Christ, he was engaging in the age-old practice of using irony to make a social statement.

Like Lennon, people rely on figurative speech all the time to help convey their messages. When a coworker says her boss's request made her "flip her lid," her use of an idiom is easily understood as a description of anger. When someone says his relationship is "at a crossroads" or "going downhill," he is using a familiar metaphor to describe the situation. Indeed, figures of speech are so common that one study predicts that each individual will utter 25 million metaphors during a given 60-year life span.

Why is figurative speech so prevalent, and why do we so often rely on irony, sarcasm, metaphor, slang, and other forms of figurative speech to help us communicate? According to Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, figurative speech comes naturally because it parallels the nonliteral way we experience much of our lives. "People assume that we think literally, so they see figurative speech as a departure from that," says Gibbs. "I disagree. I think figurative speech reflects how we actually experience much of our lives. We talk about life and love as being like a journey because that's how it feels. It is like a journey."

A leading researcher in the field of psycholinguistics, Gibbs has stirred controversy with his views, which he presents in his new book, The Poetics of Mind (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For decades, scholars have tended to view figurative language as a departure from literal thought--a poetic form of communication that tends to hide or even distort the real meaning of a message. On the contrary, says Gibbs, figurative speech reveals the poetic structure of the mind. "We think of poets as special, unique individuals with rare abilities to talk about things like love," says Gibbs. "In fact, there's a relatively small number of metaphors that are used to describe love, and poets elaborate on the same basic metaphors that everyone uses."

Consider the language used to talk about love: "falling in love," "getting dumped," "drunk with love," "sustained by love," "starved for affection." "We have a very limited number of ways to talk about love--as a journey, heat, magic, or a plant to be cultivated and nurtured," says Gibbs. "Similarly, we talk about anger in terms of 'blowing your stack,' 'hitting the ceiling,' and 'getting hot under the collar.' Those are all based on the concept that anger is heated fluid in a container. It's almost impossible to think of love or anger without metaphor because we have no literal concept of them."

Gibbs believes people are particularly inclined to rely on metaphors to describe things that are difficult to grasp, such as emotions or abstract ideas, and that metaphoric themes emerge in part because physical sensations are associated with emotions, such as the hot flush of anger. "The fact is that metaphor is so pervasive, we're blind to it," says Gibbs. "Even when people don't think they're doing it, they're doing it. Everybody's doing it. You can't help but do it."

In his book, Gibbs draws on sources as diverse as Plato and Sylvia Plath, rock star Annie Lennox and Supreme Court decisions. He quotes a midwestern factory worker describing his view of life:

Well to me, you gotta keep forward. You don't wanna make no turns, 'cause if you make a turn you're gonna be off course. And you're not gonna go any further. So you just stay on a straight line. Sure, you're gonna run into some obstacles. But it's just temporary. There's gonna be some obstacles but you gotta jump back on track.

Figurative language appears to make perfect sense to listeners. Gibbs, whose vast empirical work includes experiments to measure how long it takes people to understand metaphor and sarcasm, has found that in many cases people don't take any longer to understand figurative speech. Young children also appear to grasp and use figurative speech at an early age, although Gibbs notes that more research in that area is needed. Similarly, the small amount of cross-cultural research that has been done on figurative speech indicates that some metaphors are shared by different cultures.

Gibbs maintains that many concepts have come to be regarded as objective truth despite the fact that they are largely the products of figurative thought. "When scientists develop computerized models of how the mind works, they believe that's actually how the mind works, when in fact it's a model of their ideas," explains Gibbs. "We've lost sight of the role of figurative thought, which provides much of the foundation for thought, reason, and imagination."

A dedicated empirical scientist himself, Gibbs spent five years writing his book, frequently setting it aside to conduct his own experiments. "Cognitive science has been seriously limited by the dominance of the traditional view that thought and language are inherently literal," says Gibbs. "I describe my work to graduate students by saying that for years cognitive scientists have been acting like drunks looking for their car keys only under the light of the lamppost. I'm saying let's crawl out into the darkness and see what's out there."

(This release is also available on UC NewsWire, the University of California's electronic news service. To access by modem, dial 1- 209-244-6971.)

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