Autism, Metaphor and Relevance Theory

The pattern of impairments exhibited by some individuals on the autism spectrum appears to challenge the relevance‐theoretic account of metaphor (Carston, 1996, 2002; Sperber and Wilson, 2002; Sperber and Wilson, 2008). A subset of people on the autism spectrum have near‐normal syntactic, phonologic...

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Published inMind & language Vol. 25; no. 2; pp. 196 - 216
Main Author WEARING, CATHERINE
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.04.2010
Subjects
Autism
Implicature
Irony
Metaphors
Pragmatics
Relevance Theory
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Summary:The pattern of impairments exhibited by some individuals on the autism spectrum appears to challenge the relevance‐theoretic account of metaphor (Carston, 1996, 2002; Sperber and Wilson, 2002; Sperber and Wilson, 2008). A subset of people on the autism spectrum have near‐normal syntactic, phonological, and semantic abilities while having severe difficulties with the interpretation of metaphor, irony, conversational implicature, and other pragmatic phenomena. However, Relevance Theory treats metaphor as importantly unlike phenomena such as conversational implicature or irony and like instances of ordinary literal speech. In this paper, I show how Relevance Theory can account for the prima facie incongruity between its treatment of metaphor and the case of individuals with autism.
Bibliography:istex:15A8DBA59AD0E6EB097716D7A275C7FDB17EDBF5
ark:/67375/WNG-8D85G492-C
ArticleID:MILA1386
Particular thanks to Robyn Carston, Luke Jerzykiewicz, Nausicaa Pouscoulous, Stacy Sneeringer, and Rob Stainton for very helpful discussions and comments. Thanks also to anonymous referees for this journal for their comments, and to members of the Pragmatics Reading Group at UCL for lively discussion of an earlier draft of this paper.
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ISSN:0268-1064
1468-0017
DOI:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2009.01386.x