Rachel Giora

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Rachel Giora is Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University. Her research areas include the cognitive aspects of discourse coherence, discourse relevance, language and ideology, women and language, and the language of literary texts. As of 1997, her work has focused on the Graded Salience Hypothesis, including the psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics of figurative language (irony, jokes, and metaphor), context effects, optimal innovations, aesthetic pleasure, discourse negation, and the notion of salience in relation to autism, context, and nonliteral language. Her recent research focuses on the Defaultness Hypothesis, which maintains that default interpretations reign. In all, she has published over 140 articles, a book - On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language (Oxford University Press, 2003), a 6 volume series - Metaphor and Figurative Language, coedited (with Patrick Hanks), Routledge, 2011, and (with Michael Haugh) a book titled Doing Pragmatics of Interculturally (de Gruyter Mouton 2017).

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Papers by Rachel Giora

The role of defaultness and personality factors in sarcasm interpretation: Evidence from eye- tracking during reading

by Ruth Filik, Christina Ralph-Nearman, and Rachel Giora

Metaphor & Symbol, 2018

Theorists have debated whether our ability to understand sarcasm (pertaining here to verbal irony... more Theorists have debated whether our ability to understand sarcasm (pertaining here to verbal irony) is principally determined by the context or by properties of the comment itself. The current research investigated an alternative view that broadens the focus on the comment itself, suggesting that mitigating a highly positive concept by using negation generates sarcastic interpretations by default. In the current study, pretests performed on the target utterances presented in isolation established their default interpretations; novel affirmative phrases (e.g., "He is the best lawyer") were interpreted literally, whereas equally novel negative counterparts (e.g., "He isn’t the best lawyer") were interpreted sarcastically. In Experiment 1 (an eye-tracking study), prior context biased these utterances toward literal or sarcastic interpretations. Results showed that target utterances were easier to process in contexts supporting their default interpretations, regardless of affirmation/negation. Results from a second eye-tracking experiment sug- gested that readers’ tendency to interpret negative phrases sarcastically is related to their own tendency to use malicious humor. Our findings suggest that negation leads to certain ambiguous utterances receiving sarcastic interpretations by default and that this process may be further intensified by personality factors.

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