Sam Glucksberg (February 6, 1933 – August 29, 2022)Sam Glucksberg, pioneer in experimental psycholinguistics and 'outstanding mentor,' dies at 89 was a Canadian professor in the Psychology Department at Princeton University in New Jersey, known for his works on figurative language: metaphors, irony, sarcasm, and idioms. He is particularly known for manipulating the Candle Problem experiment which had participants figure out the best way to erect a candle on a wall. Along with performing experiments, Glucksberg also wrote Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms, published by Oxford University Press in 2001.
Biography Glucksberg was born February 6, 1933, in Montreal, Quebec. He received his B.S. in psychology in 1956 at City College of New York, magna cum laude. He then received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology with distinction at New York University in 1960. 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. He was chairman of the Department of Psychology from 1974-80.
Academic career Glucksberg was interested in how people use and understand language in everyday life, specifically in the areas of metaphors, irony, sarcasm, and idioms. These are areas in the psychology of language that are not widely covered. Glucksberg set out to understand how people recognize and understand these parts of figurative speech. He wanted to learn if people can respond to figurative speech with the same speed as literal speech. He also focused time and research in areas of language comprehension. In this area he concentrated on the context of communication and figuring out if the context determines whether one comprehends or if one can comprehend without knowing the context of the conversation. Referential communication was another aspect of language Glucksberg researched on and specifically how it affects young children.
Metaphors 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. The first step is to figure out the literal meaning of a sentence. For the example "lawyers are sharks" one would derive the meaning "lawyers are a fish in the ocean", which makes no sense. The second stage addresses this interpretation against the context of utterance. Because it makes no sense in context, we then go to the third step which searches for a nonliteral meaning that does make sense. When the literal meaning violates one of Grice's rules of conversation it then becomes defective and becomes a false statement. This statement then has to be rejected and replaced with a non-literal interpretation. This model shows that non-literal meanings are secondary and literal meanings are automatic.
Glucksberg argued and showed that non-literal meanings can be comprehended as easily as literal meanings. It is not dependent on failure to find a literal meaning but instead a mandatory and automatic process. He proved that non-literal meaning is comprehended just as easily as literal meaning in his experiment where he had participants listen to metaphors like "Jerry first knew that loneliness was a desert* when he was very young." While listening, target words would appear, and participants had to decide whether or not they were words. For the example above, there were three different types of target words, metaphorical, literal, and control. The words that corresponded with these categories were "isolate", "sand", and "mustache". The findings showed that participants were faster with metaphorical and literal target words than they were with the control words. In the next experiment he showed that metaphors are understood directly as categorical assertions. This experiment was modeled after Stroop's classic experiment that people cannot ignore literal meanings. In this well-known experiment, color words were presented in a different color than the word (for example the word "red" would be in the color green) and participants were asked to say the color of the ink. They had difficulty saying green when the word red was printed, meaning they could not inhibit reading words that are attended. Glucksberg applied this knowledge to literally false but metaphorically true sentences. Participants were shown sentences one at a time and then told to determine whether or not they were literally true or false. There were four different types of sentences used, literally true, literally false, metaphors, and scrambled metaphors (metaphors that make no sense). If metaphorical meanings were ignored, then people should reject them at the same speed they do for the scrambled metaphors. But if metaphorical meanings are automatically registered then they should take longer to judge as false than their scrambled counterparts because of the response competition between the true non-literal meanings and the false literal ones of the metaphor sentences. The results showed that people had more difficulty deciding if the metaphors were literally false.
Class assertion: Tversky and his contrast model set out to prove that metaphors are treated like implicit similes, so metaphors like "my job is a jail" would be treated as a comparison statement, "my job is like a jail." The problem with this theory is that it fails to account for two important characteristics of metaphorical comparisons. Metaphoric comparisons are irreversible, and people can easily determine whether or not a comparison is literal or metaphorical. Glucksberg argued that metaphors are class-inclusion assertions in which the topic of the metaphor is assigned a certain category. Applied to the example "my job is a jail", the intended meaning of the sentence is that their job belongs to a category that is referred to as a jail. The word "jail" can belong to a number of categories including types of buildings, punishments or situations that are related to the word "jail". In this case the listener would apply the situations related to the word "jail" (unpleasant, confining, and involuntary) to the word "job" and be able to make sense of the metaphor. When used metaphorically, the word "jail" refers to a thing that conveys certain characteristics to mind, while when used literally it refers to an actual token. This can be explained by Roger Brown who argued that metaphors involve categorization. It is understood the same way as taxonomic categories (Rosch, 1973, 1978) which have two sets of structural properties. The property is vertical and reflects the different levels of hierarchy. For example, the category "food" is organized hierarchically with "vegetable" being superordinate, "tomato" being basic and "plum tomato" being subordinate. When applied to "my job is a jail," "jail" would be at the basic level, "county jail" at the subordinate level and situations at the superordinate level. Categories like "jail" represent a set of properties that can be used to characterize a set of properties of a topic of interest, in this case "my job".
Some metaphors are able to be reversed to the contrary of the contrast model. Metaphors like "sermons are sleeping pills" and "a mighty fortress is our God" are able to be reversed because the relative roles of the topic and vehicle are unaffected by the reversal. Glucksberg pointed out the weak points of the contrast model and introduced the class inclusion assertion model which produces similarity relation between a and b, much like any classification of two objects.
Idioms
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. They presented people with stories that were consistent with this mapping and consistent with the hypothesis that readers activate and use mappings when dealing with idioms. Glucksberg found that while people preferred stylistically consistent idioms, comprehension of nonpreferred idioms was no slower than preferred ones. He concluded that such mappings are available but they are not routinely accessed and used for idiom comprehension. He presented three experiments to test his hypothesis and to determine when mappings are accessed for comprehension. 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." Both the novelty of the expression and the explicit statement of the analogy between emotional state and lowness requires the use of the analogy to understand the expression.
Experiment 1: Making Mappings Explicit
In this experiment participants were introduced to four different types of scenarios: implicit-mapping, no-mapping, explicit-mapping, and literal meaning scenario. If the conceptual mapping view is correct, then the implicit scenario should initiate conceptual mapping and the non-mapping scenario should not. The final sentence then should be easier to understand following the implicit scenario than the non-mapping one, but Glucksberg claims that the implicit model uses stock phrases that can be understood directly, so it would not invoke conceptual mapping. So there should be no difference in ease of comprehension between implicit and the no-mapping scenario. He reasoned that people are more inclined to use conceptual mapping when they are explicitly invited to do so. The results of the experiment showed that it took longer to comprehend the final sentence following the implicit scenario than the no-mapping scenario, but the response time for the implicit scenario was not significantly slower than the no-mapping scenario. The explicit condition yielded results almost identical to the no-mapping condition, suggesting that even when mapping is spelled out to the reader, it is not sufficient to lead them to use mapping in comprehension of stock phrases.
Sarcasm
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. It usually means the opposite of what the speaker actually says. According to Grice and his Maxims of Conversation, the speaker and listen try to be truthful and say nothing false or it will disrupt the maxim of quality (Grice 1975). The speaker is either violating the maxim of quality or they are trying to communicate a message by appearing to violate the maxim. He said that when someone says something that is opposite to the facts, listeners interpret it as the opposite. The problem with this theory is that it doesn't explain why the speaker is motivated to say the opposite of what they meant, nor does it explain the relevance of saying the opposite of what is meant. 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. They conducted three experiments that tested to see how sarcastic a final remark would be in a story prompt the participants were given.