Sam Glucksberg
Sam Glucksberg (February 6, 1933 – August 29, 2022)[1] was a Canadian professor in the Psychology Department at Princeton University in New Jersey,[2] known for his works on figurative language: metaphors, irony, sarcasm, and idioms.
Along with performing experiments, Glucksberg has also written Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms, published by Oxford University Press in 2001.
After a period of three years as a research psychologist at the U.S. Army Human Engineering Laboratories, he came to Princeton as an instructor in 1963, and rose progressively through the ranks, being appointed full professor in 1970.
Glucksberg was interested in how people use and understand language in everyday life, specifically in the areas of metaphors, irony, sarcasm, and idioms.
Referential communication was another aspect of language Glucksberg researched on and specifically how it affects young children.
Metaphors like "Lawyers are sharks" enable us to create novel categories that allow us to characterize the topic of interest.
In this case we use "shark" as a metaphorical category and apply the vicious and predatory sense of the animal to lawyers.
This enables us to have a direct link between lawyer and shark allowing us to create a mental picture.
The standard pragmatic view states that understanding metaphors requires a three-stage process.
Participants were shown sentences one at a time and then told to determine whether or not they were literally true or false.
Gibbs and Nayak (1991) determined that idioms like "he blew his stack" are said to be motivated by mappings such as anger is heated fluid in a container.
Glucksberg explained that conceptual mapping might be used when presented with novel utterances like "I am feeling lower than a piece of gum stuck on the bottom of your boots."
[6] Experiment 1: Making Mappings Explicit Implicit-As a scientist, Tina thinks of her theories as her contribution.
[6] Sarcasm is characterized as verbal irony, which is when a speaker expresses an attitude toward some object, event, or person by saying something that is not literally true.
Roger Kreuz and Glucksberg propose the echoic reminder theory to explain sarcasm because it provides motivation for saying the opposite of what is meant but it also provides an explanation to the marked asymmetry of ironic statements; positive statements can be used ironically.
"The weather should be nice tomorrow," said Jane, who worked for a local TV station as a meteorologist.
Kreuz and Glucksberg found that when the final remark matched the outcome, participants interpreted no sarcasm.
[7] Situations become ironic when an expectation is violated or otherwise invalidated in specific ways (Lucariello, 1994; Muecke, 1969).
Roger Kreuz and Glucksberg suggested that irony is used to remind of antecedent events, social norms, or shared expectations in order to call attention to a discrepancy between what is and what should have been.
[8] Kumon-Nakamura and Glucksberg proposed the allusional pretense theory of irony to explain why sentences come off as ironic.
The first part dealt with pragmatic insincerity, which occurs when a speaker is perceived as intentionally violating felicity conditions for at least of these aspects of an utterance.
The second part is that ironic utterances must allude to some prior expectation norm or convention that has been violated in one way or another.
Similar to the experiments dealing with sarcasm, Glucksberg had participants read short stories that were intended to be ironic and some that were literal.
[8] This data supports Glucksberg's theory, which is that what makes an expression ironic is not whether it is non-literal but rather if it is intended sincerely.
[9] Models have been proposed to explain how contextual information is used to decide the appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word such as "cast".
If it fails to provide the right information needed to answer the question, then a slow "don't know" response is made.
To test the second part of the model, he kept the same procedure as the first experiment but added explicit "don't know" sentences and concluded that explicit sentences should take longer to process resulting in a slow "don't know", because memory search will retrieve stored information relating the name and object.
In his first experiment, he had participants view the previous scenarios and write down the first words that came to mind under each object in the pictures.
The listener picks a figure (referent) on the basis of the verbal message provided by the speaker.
[13] The first is the stimulus array in order to make sure his message takes in account the attributes of the referent which will distinguish it from other non-referents.
