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Research My field is psycholinguistics and my research investigates primarily how people comprehend language. I’ve chosen figurative language as the primary area because of the particular challenge it poses for theories of language comprehension. Given that speakers of figurative language are not literally saying what they intend to express, this type of language poses the strongest test of comprehension theories. My main research program thus investigates the basic question of how figurative language is comprehended. Given the heightened risk of miscomprehension of figurative as compared to literal language, my research also asks the question of why speakers use figurative language--what does figurative language accomplish for speakers that warrants this risk? My work also addresses how other forms of indirect or figurative language are comprehended and why they are used. For instance, asyndeton is a kind of utterance where all but the skeletal syntactic categories are dropped (e.g., "Been there, done that", "I work, I eat, I sleep", etc.). As such, asyndeton can be considered a form of indirect language because a speaker does not just say literally what he or she means. Instead, the speaker uses the minimal form to imply a great deal more than what is said. Moreover the implied meaning in asyndeton goes beyond the omitted words from the utterance--a speaker appears to use asyndeton to accomplish several other pragmatic functions. As most of the research on figurative language (including my own) has looked at only the two dominant types, metaphor and verbal irony, it is important to move the investigation to other forms such as asyndeton so that we give our explanations reasonable opportunity to fail.
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