Selective View of the Last 50 Years of the Experimental Psycholinguistics of Idiom, Metaphor, and Irony: A Commentary

ABSTRACT

The aim of this commentary is to situate and comment on the four excellent articles in this special issue within the arc of the last 50 years of experimental psycholinguistic research on idioms, metaphors, and irony/sarcasm. The arc is one in which figurative language is of an increasingly multifaceted nature requiring the rapid activation and integration of pragmatic, sociocultural, and semantic sources of information. Future avenues for research are suggested.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Drs. Hamad Al-Azary, J. Nick Read, Ruth Filik, and Henri Olkoniemi for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article and to Dr. Karys Peterson-Katz for her help in overcoming some formatting issues. Naturally, they are not responsible for any of the opinions or observations I express.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For purposes of this article, we consider sarcasm a subset of irony, possessing additional properties not found in nonsarcastic irony (see for instance Filik et al., 2019).

2. Although beyond the scope of this article, it should be noted that individual difference variables have been applied to various subdisciplines in the social and natural sciences studying figurative language from the 1970s onward.

3. Idioms, like proverbs, are only idiomatic (or proverbial) if they are familiar to a person; otherwise, they are merely sentences or word strings. In the discussion here I describe items as idioms when they are familiar to at least many L1 users.