Element Order in Metaphorical and Literal Phrases

Abstract

The present study examines the role of a noun’s concreteness in determining the order of nouns within literal and metaphorical conjunction constructions. Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, 45 participants were asked to recall sentences with canonic and non-canonic order. In Experiment 2, 41 participants performed a lexical decision task to the final word of a canonic or non-canonic sentence. The results show that concreteness plays an important role in recalling word order in both literal and metaphorical sentences. In addition, canonic metaphorical sentences were processed faster than were non-canonic metaphorical sentences. Our findings suggest that concreteness affects element order in conjunction constructions but that the effect of concreteness is more pronounced in metaphorical phrases. These findings are discussed in the context of the class inclusion framework (Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990).

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Notes

1. ¹For a more detailed analysis of zeugma from a linguistic perspective, see Croft and Cruse (2004), Lascarides et al. (1996), Solska (2008), Veale (2003), and Zimmerman (2009).