ИСТИНА

According to the Language Acquisition Hypothesis, proposed by M. Tomasello (Tomasello 2005), to comprehend figurative language a child has no need for parameters to recognize, neither there exists a problem of their linking. It is the communicative functions of the linguistic forms that activate the cognitive and pragmatic abilities of children and help them get tuned for linguistic creativity and figurative language comprehension. Recent research shows that figurativeness comprehension accounts for several construal schemas related to the communicative functions processing, e.g. alignment with pre-existing patterns, embodied simulations, analogy, pragmatic effects, entailment, focusing, etc. (e.g. Gentner 2010, Colston 2015, Gibbs 2017), and that these operations are age dependent. Surprisingly enough, very little work has been undertaken to study these construal schemas interplay, in most cases they are studied separately, although it is obvious that body schemas, conceptual mapping schemas or schemas of focusing may interrelate. In this study I explore various construal schemas as being more or less salient for figurative language processing by secondary school children applying the notions of salience and defaultness developed by R. Giora (Giora 2003, Giora et al. 2018). To elicit the salience construal schemas for figurativeness construal adopted by the authors of top secondary school literature (issued in the 1960s – 2000s), I conduct the corpus analysis of 57 discourse markers which correlate with the construal schemas of linguistic and perceptual focusing, embodied simulation, conceptual mapping, and event construal. Variance analysis helps reveal the salience of some construal schemas as well as the salience of their interplay. Salient and low-salient construal schemas are verified in the eye-tracking patterns and default and nondefault interpretations of secondary school children reading textual fragments based on these construal schemas. The results have shown that while the general eye movement patterns displayed variability and inconsistency (which accounts for still unstable reading patterns at this age), the default / nondefault interpretation patterns strongly correlated with the salient construal schemas tested. These patterns show preference for longer fixations in response to low-salient construal schemas only in case of default interpretations, whereas nondefault interpretations did not affect the eye movement patterns. It lends credence to the idea that there exist and may be traced age dependent synchronized construal operations in linguistic creativity tuning and figurative language comprehension.