Nonliteral Language

The articles in this special issue grew out of a symposium on nonliteral language that was held at a recent meeting of the American Psychological Society. The symposium's title, "Nonliteral Language: Processing and Use," refers to the two aspects of figuration that frame contemporary research on this topic. On the one hand, nonliteral language poses challenges for theories of semantics and the cognitive processing of language. On the other hand, nonliteral language interpretation is heavily influenced by social and contextual factors and continues to challenge theorists and researchers in pragmatics.

It can be argued that language theorists have not always risen to the challenges posed by nonliteral language. Many of the early models of language production and comprehension failed to address the figurative uses of language. More recently, some of the language models proposed by cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers have not addressed the social functions of nonliteral language. This issue will redress some of these problems. Focusing on two classes of figurative language -- irony and metaphor -- the papers provide perspective on the current state of nonliteral language research, and presage some of the research questions of tomorrow.