Bilingual Figurative Language Processing

Bilingual Figurative Language Processing is a timely book that provides a much-needed bilingual perspective to the broad field of figurative language. This is the first book of its kind to address how bilinguals acquire, store, and process figurative language, such as idiomatic expressions (such as kick the bucket), metaphors (such as lawyers are sharks), and irony, and how these tropes might interact in real time across the bilingual's two languages. This volume offers the reader and the bilingual student an overview of the major strands of research, both theoretical and empirical, currently being undertaken in this field of inquiry. At the same time, Bilingual Figurative Language Processing provides readers and undergraduate and graduate students with the opportunity to acquire hands-on experience in the development of psycholinguistic experiments in bilingual figurative language. Each chapter includes a section on suggested student research projects. Selected chapters provide detailed procedures on how to design and develop psycholinguistic experiments. Review: Advance praise: 'This groundbreaking book dares to venture not just in one but in two areas that are rarely visited by research in bilingualism and figurative language. Grounded in state-of-the-art theoretical, methodological, analytical, and experimental approaches, this volume offers cutting-edge research on acquisition, production, processing and comprehension of figurative language in the bilingual linguistic repertoire. The editors deserve our great admiration for bringing together a team of international researchers to cover a wide spectrum of topics ranging from humor, metaphors and irony to negative sentiments in order to foreground applied and cross-linguistic issues.' Tej K. Bhatia, Syracuse University, New York Advance praise: 'This volume is the first to look at nonliteral language processing from a psycholinguistic and neuro-linguistic perspective. This is a major change - and improvement - over traditional approaches, in which the always-present idiomaticity and metaphorical side of words and larger expressions are basically ignored. The issues are discussed from various complementary perspectives, making this a must-read for students and researchers in the field of multilingual processing.' Kees de Bot, University of Groningen, The Netherlands Advance praise: 'This wide-ranging exploration of bilingual figurative language processing is extremely timely and valuable. Not only do the various contributions collectively provide a state-of-the-art overview of research in this important area, but they also give the reader a very good sense of what research in this domain looks like and feels like. Supplementary student material at the end of each chapter provides a basis for students actually to begin doing such research on their own.' David Singleton, University of Pannonia, Hungary