Interview to Rachel Giora

Rachel Giora is Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University. Her work has been devoted to exploring the ways salient meanings of words shape how we think and speak. Giora analyzes meaning salience in both figurative and literal language. The main question around this general topic is the way in which, while words have multiple meanings, some meanings are more accessible than others. Given the notion of graded saliency, access of information stored in the mental lexicon is therefore ordered: more salient meanings are accessed before less salient meanings. Degree of salience is determined by factors such as frequency of use, experiential familiarity, conventionality, prototypicality, etc. Giora argues that both literal and non-literal meanings that are salient are cognitively prominent salient meanings and therefore they play a very important role in the comprehension and production of language. Her work focuses on the psycholinguistics of figurative language (irony, jokes, and metaphor), context effects, optimal innovations and aesthetic pleasure, discourse negation, context and degree of salience. One of her most popular books is “On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language”, published by Oxford University Press in 2003.