The Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, following from the Graded Salience Hypothesis, is being reviewed and revisited. The attempt is to expand the notion of Optimal Innovation to allow it to apply to both stimuli’s coded meanings as well as their noncoded, constructed interpretations. According to the Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, Optimal Innovations, when devised, will be more pleasing than nonoptimally innovative counterparts. Unlike such competitors, Optimal Innovations deautomatize familiar coded alternatives, which invoke unconditional responses alongside novel but distinct ones, allowing both responses (...) to interact. Conversely, the Revised Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, introduced and tested here, follows from the Defaultness Hypothesis. It posits that both default lexicalized meanings and default constructed interpretations might be qualifiable for Optimal Innovation once they are deautomatized by nondefault, context-dependent counterparts. Such nondefault Optimal Innovations will be pleasing, more pleasing than default and nondefault counterparts not qualifiable for Optimal Innovation. Results of two experiments support the Revised Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, while further corroborating the Defaultness Hypothesis. (shrink)

Findings from two experiments argue in favor of the superiority of default, preferred interpretations over non-default less favored counterparts, outshining degree of non-salience, non-literalness, contextual strength, and negation. They show that, outside of a specific context, the default interpretation of specific negative constructions is a non-salient interpretation 1; their non-default interpretation is a salience-based alternative. In contrast, the default interpretation of the affirmative counterparts is a salience-based interpretation ; their non-default interpretation is a non-salient alternative. When in equally strongly supportive (...) contexts, default yet non-salient negative sarcasm is processed faster than non-default, non-salient yet affirmative sarcasm and faster than non-default yet salience-based negativ.. (shrink)

Four experiments and 2 corpus-based studies demonstrate that negation is a determinant factor affecting novel nonliteral utterance-interpretation by default. For a nonliteral utterance-interpretation to be favored by default, utterances should be potentially ambiguous between literal and nonliteral interpretations. They should therefore be (a) unfamiliar, (b) free of semantic anomaly or any kind of internal incongruity, and (c) unbiased by contextual information. Experiments 1–3 demonstrate that negative utterances, meeting these 3 conditions, were interpreted metaphorically (This is not a safe) or sarcastically (...) (Ambitious she is not) when presented in isolation and were therefore processed faster in contexts strongly biasing them toward their nonliteral than toward their (equally biased) literal interpretation. Experiment 4 reduces the possibility that it is structural markedness on its own that induces nonliteralness. Two corpus-based studies provide corroborating evidence, supporting the view of negation as an operator generating nonliteral interpretations by default. (shrink)

Resisting Contextual Information: You Can't Put a Salient Meaning Down Two experiments support the graded salience hypothesis, which assumes that early processing involves distinct mechanisms-linguistic and contextual-that do not interact but run parallel. While contextual processes make up an integrative, top-down mechanism that benefits from linguistic and extra-linguistic information, the linguistic mechanism is modular. Using Vu et al.'s materials, Experiment 1 shows that the sentential position of a target word is crucial for the operation of the global, predictive mechanism, whose (...) effects, accumulated in prior discourse, mask lexical effects in final, but not in initial position. Experiment 2 shows that even in a sentential position that favors contextual effects, lexical access is not affected: Salient meanings are activated upon encounter of the lexical stimulus, regardless of contextual information to the contrary. Taken together, these findings argue against direct access models, which suggest that context can selectively activate the appropriate meaning, regardless of salience. (shrink)

In this paper we test the hypothesis that tautologies are actually not tautologies. Indeed, when exploring natural language use, it seems that, having...