Nonliteral communication is weird. Nonliteral speakers do something with their literal content which they don't do when speaking literally. What exactly do they do with it? Audiences identify literal content and use that as a guide to nonliteral content. How exactly do they get there? I argue that nonliteral utterances represent their speakers as pretending and figures of speech are unified around their dynamic effects: they license audiences to commit to the bit by pretending like their utteran…
Read moreNonliteral communication is weird. Nonliteral speakers do something with their literal content which they don't do when speaking literally. What exactly do they do with it? Audiences identify literal content and use that as a guide to nonliteral content. How exactly do they get there? I argue that nonliteral utterances represent their speakers as pretending and figures of speech are unified around their dynamic effects: they license audiences to commit to the bit by pretending like their utterances are literally true. Committing to the bit can involve pragmatic phenomena traditionally explained by common ground models, like presupposition accommodation, but with a pretense twist. Explaining these utterances requires that nonliteral interlocutors coordinate around a shared body of information that is jointly pretended: the common playground. I argue that figures of speech come with proprietary salience-raising mechanisms, and that the playground account deepens insights into the diverse purposes of nonliteral speech.
