ABSTRACT
The past several decades of psychological and linguistic empirical research and theorizing on nonliteral language has branched into a few key directions. Much of this work has focused and continues to focus on the comprehension of forms of figurative, indirect, and other kinds of nonliteral language. Some of this work concerns specific, step-by-step, online processing; other work is directed at the products of the comprehension and interpretation processes. A related line of work has attended to the sorts of pragmatic accomplishments that these kinds of language perform for interlocutors. This work seeks explanations of what is done by forms of nonliteral language and how these achievements are brought about. A growing interest in the production of nonliteral language is also emerging, as is a concern for authenticity. And the theoretical efforts to account for the accumulating empirical findings continue in light of these developments as well as related phenomena like situational irony.
