Spontaneous production of figurative language and gesture in college lectures : a comparison across disciplines

Previous figurative language research has focused primarily on theories of comprehension and word meaning and has been conducted in highly controlled experimental situations. As a result, little is known about the spontaneous production of figurative language in ongoing discourse, how it functions in various contexts, and how it relates to the production of gestures. Corts and Pollio (1999) addressed these issues by examining of figurative language and gesture production in college lectures. Their results indicated that figurative language was often produced in bursts of novel, coherent figures and concerned the primary topics of the lecture. Figurative language outside of the bursts was more likely to concern the lecture itself and was less likely to be novel. Finally, when gestures overlap figures of speech, they present a representation of the same metaphor.The present research addresses two related goals: (1) to replicate the procedures of Cortsand Pollio (1999) including additional lecturers from diverse content areas and (2) to include additional lectures and content areas so that additional patterns and functions of figurative language use may be observed.Two lectures fi-om each participant (one Geology professor and one Classicsprofessor) provided the text for this study. Data for language and gestures were analyzed independently on the basis of a moving average procedure which identified areas of increased production rates (i.e., bursts). In accordance with Corts and Pollio (1999),figurative language within a burst was predominately novel rather than cliched, was coherent with a root metaphor, and centered around the main topics of the lecture. Also,IVfigures within bursts included analogies and metaphor, while topical figures outside of bursts often included other types of figures (hyperbole, litote, etc.). These results are interpreted to suggest that figurative language production proceeds at a fairly even rate including a variety of types of figures in all categories (novelty, topicality, coherence, and type of figure). Bursts, however, are characterized as a shift in the lecture to a concept which is understood metaphorically. At this point, the figurative language increases;typically in a burst of novel, topical, and coherent metaphors.