The Interpretation of Semantic Anomaly in Context
Two pilot studies are presented in the context of a discussion of the interpretation of anomalous sentences. In the first study, it was shown that naive language users differ in their judgments of the interpretability of semantically anomalous sentences; in the second, that they coincide in their ranking of the appropriateness of various contexts for the interpretation of anomalous sentences. It is argued that the concept of anomaly should be replaced by that of interpretability and that interpretability should be considered a cognitive strategy of searching for meaning. Implications for the psycholinguistic investigation of metaphor are considered. (Aa)
Microform, English, 1976