Raymond W. Gibbs

Many scholars and medical professionals argue over the importance of metaphor in thinking about, and speaking of, cancer and other illnesses. Our study presents an analysis of the metaphors used by 6 women in their narratives of their experiences with cancer. We claim from our analyses that metaphorical talk about cancer reflects enduring metaphorical patterns of thought. Women used multiple, sometimes contradictory metaphors to conceptualize their complex cancer experiences. Many of their metaphors used to understand cancer are actually based on ordinary embodied experiences such that people still refer to the healthy body in trying to understand cancer even when their own bodies have been disrupted. We discuss the importance of our findings for understanding the relation between language and thought in regard to human illness.

Most cases of verbal irony involve a situation in which a speaker says one thing and deliberately intends for his or her listener to infer an ironic meaning (e.g., “What lovely weather!” spoken in the midst of a downpour). However, there are occasions when listeners infer ironic meanings for utterances even though speakers do not intend their utterances to convey irony. For example, listeners may infer that the expression “I would never be involved in any cheating” may have an ironic meaning if the speaker, unbeknownst to him or her, actually contributed to someone's cheating in a class exam. Numerous instances of dramatic irony in literature are based on situations like this in which listeners or readers recognize the unintended irony in what speakers say. We report the results of four experiments to show that people can recognize ironic meanings that are not intended by speakers and that processing unintended irony can be done quite easily precisely because speakers’ utterances, unbeknownst to them, spontaneously create ironic situations. These findings have significant implications for psycholinguistic theories of irony comprehension and, more generally, for intentional theories of ordinary language use.