Ingrid Lossius Falkum: The Development of Non-Literal Uses of Language

In this talk I present some studies of children’s comprehension of non-literal uses of language (metonymy, loose use). I discuss the results in the context of the DEVCOM project which investigates the development of non-literal uses in more broadly: One hypothesis is that children’s tendency for literal interpretation of many non-literal uses is not the result of poor pragmatic abilities but arises because attending to conventional senses serves an important function at a particular stage of language learning. The hypothesis has testable predictions for different types of non-literal uses of language, including figurative and loose uses, lexical innovation, and manner implicatures.