Metaphor Glucksberg Metaphor Analysis

The psycholinguistics of metaphor

Glucksberg’s article was about how humans could understand metaphors. To determine how humans are capable of comprehending metaphors, Glucksberg draws a comparison between metaphorical and literal phrases to find their similarities and discover any distinct differences in their processing. To do this, he examines two hypothesized ways of processing metaphors and uses the evidence in his arsenal to find the most accurate hypothesis. To understand how the comprehension of metaphors is done by humans, Glucksberg differentiated novel and conventional metaphors to see if familiarity was a significant factor. Glucksberg looked at the Blasko and Connine experiment and found that familiarity was irrelevant in the comprehension of metaphors. I think that it’s important that he took familiarity into consideration for comprehending metaphors because it seems that familiar metaphors would be comprehended quicker than unfamiliar ones,
For example, you’d understand “lawyers are sharks,” as meaning “lawyers are merciless, aggressive, etc.,” and this meaning would be different than “lawyers are like sharks.” I agree; when a person uses a metaphor, they intend it to be taken wholly, whereas a simile is more tentative. Glucksberg also says that in an experiment they had done themselves, metaphors has different properties to people than similes, and they were interpreted more “metaphorically” than similes. Further details about this experiment would have added to his point that metaphors and similes weren’t interpreted the same way, so I wish he had said more about it. Simply mentioning a few vague details about the experiment doesn’t add reliability to his contrast between understanding of similes and