Download or read book The Literal and Nonliteral in Language and Thought written by Seana Coulson and published by Peter Lang Pub Incorporated. This book was released on 2005 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distinction between literal and nonliteral meaning can be traced back to folk models about the relationship between language and the world. According to these models, sentences can be seen as building a representation of the world they describe, and understanding a sentence means knowing how each linguistic element affects the construction of the representation. Papers in this volume connect these folk models to the more scientific notions of the literal/nonliteral distinction proposed by philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists. The current volume examines the literal/nonliteral distinction from a number of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, outlining some of the problematic assumptions in traditional paradigms and pointing to promising directions for the study of meaning.