How to Cite
Abstract
Experimental investigations into figurative language processing have received little attention for languages other than English and several major European languages. Research on the Malay language, in particular, has been very limited. This study thus aimed to investigate the figurative language processing of familiar Malay idioms by L1 native speakers. Familiarity or salience is hypothesised as having a dominating effect in the processing of idiom meaning. This means, regardless of context or other possible factors, salience is said to determine processing advantage. A total of 24 participants completed a timed lexical-decision task after listening to idiomatic stimuli. Eight highly familiar idioms embedded in neutral sentences were used as auditory stimuli, and were paired visually together with either their figurative or literal meaning as target words. Results revealed a similar processing speed for responses to both literal and idiomatic meanings. Hence, it was concluded that the salience levels of both meanings are balanced in line with the Graded Salience Hypothesis.
References
Abd. Rahman, K., & Mohd. Norwawi, N. (2013, May). Proverb treatment in Malay-English machine translation. Paper presented at the 2nd International Conference on Machine Learning and Computer Science, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Abel, B. (2003). English idioms in the first language and second language lexicon: A dual representation approach, Second Language Research, 19(4), 329-358.
https://doi.org/10.1191/0267658303sr226oa
Batemanazana, V., Jaafar , A., & Salehuddin, K. (2014). A comparative study on the eye movement patterns in Malay-English bilingual readers. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 118, 229-234.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.02.031
Bobrow, S., & Bell, S. (1973). On catching on to idiomatic expressions. Memory and Cognition, 1, 343-346.
https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198118
Cacciari, C., & Tabossi, P. (1988). The comprehension of idioms. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 668-683.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-596X(88)90014-9
Charteris-Black, J. (2002). Second language figurative proficiency: A comparative study of Malay and English. Applied Linguistics, 23, 104-133.
https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/23.1.104
Charteris-Black, J. (2003). A prototype-based approach to the translation of Malay and English idioms. In S. Granger, J. Lerot, & S. Petch-Tyson (Eds.), Corpus Based Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies (pp.123-140). New York, NY: Rodopi B.V.
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004486638_011
Cieślicka, A. ( 2006). Literal salience in on-line processing of idiomatic expressions by second language learners. Second Language Research, 22, 115-44.
https://doi.org/10.1191/0267658306sr263oa
Cooper, T. C. (1999). Processing of idioms by L2 learners of English. TESOL Quarterly, 33(2), 233-262.
https://doi.org/10.2307/3587719
Daud, I. (2001). Peribahasa dan amalan negatif. Dlm. Pelita Bahasa (hlm. 16-17). Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.
Eisenbeiss, S. (2014, September). Extending experimental linguistics to underresearched languages and populations - the principle of justice and new ethical challenges. Proceedings for the "2nd annual national convention on ethics in research on human subjects: Evolving norms and guidelines for the Indian context", Institutional Ethics Board, India. Convention Centre, JNU.
Ghareeb-Ali, Z. (2008). On-line idiom processing by second language learners of English. Unpublished master's dissertation. University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
Gibbs, R.W. (1980). Spilling the beans on understanding and memory for idioms in conversation. Memory and Cognition, 8, 149-156.
https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213418
Gibbs, R.W. (1984). Literal meaning and psychological theory. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 191-219.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0803_4
Gibbs, R. W. (1986). On the psycholinguistics of sarcasm. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 115, 3-15.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.115.1.3
Gibbs, R.W. (2002). A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and implicated. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 457-486.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(01)00046-7
Gibbs, R. W., Wilson, N. L., & Bryant, G. A. (2012). Figurative language: Normal adult cognitive research. In M. Spivey, K. McRae, & M. Joanisse (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 465-484). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139029377.024
Giora, R. (1997). Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics, 7, 183-206.
https://doi.org/10.1515/cogl.1997.8.3.183
Giora, R. (1999). On the priority of salient meanings: studies of literal and figurative language. Journal of pragmatics, 31, 919-929.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00100-3
Giora, R. (2002). Literal vs. figurative language: Different or equal? Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 487-506.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(01)00045-5
Giora, R. (2003). On our mind: Salience, context and figurative language. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195136166.001.0001
Giora, R., & Fein, O. (1999a). On understanding familiar and less-familiar figurative language. Journal of pragmatics, 31, 1601-1618.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00006-5
Giora, R., & Fein, O. (1999b). Irony: Context and salience. Metaphor and Symbol, 14, 241-257.Retrieved from http://www.tau.ac.il/~giorar/files/giora.fein.99.irony.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327868MS1404_1
Giora, R., Fein, O., Laadan, D., Wolfson, J., Zeituny, M., Kidron, R., . . . Shaham, R. (2007). Expecting irony: Context vs. salience-based effects. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(2), 119-146.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10926480701235346
Hassan, A., & Mohd, A. (1993). Kamus Peribahasa Kontemporari (3rd ed.). Kuala Lumpur: PTS Professional Publishing.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
Jalil, S., & Rickard Liow, S. J. (2008). How does home language influence early spellings? Phonologically plausible errors of diglossic Malay children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29(4), 535-552.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716408080235
Katz, A. N., & Ferretti, T. R. (2001). Moment-by-moment comprehension of proverbs in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 11, 17-37.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms1101_2
Lee, L. C., Rickard Liow, S. J., & Wee, M.-L. O. (2007). Morphological structure of Malay: Using psycholinguistic analyses of rated familiarity. In M. Alves, P. Sidwell & D. Gil (Eds.), SEALS VIII Papers from the 8th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 1998 (pp. 109-119). Canberra, Australia: The Australian National University.
Lim, K. H. (2003). Budi as the Malay mind: A philosophical study of Malay ways of reasoning and emotion in peribahasa. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Hamburg, Germany.
Ishak, N. S., & Mansor, M. M. (2011, November). Peribahasa: Gambaran minda Melayu dalam penciptaan iklan. Kertas kerja dibentangkan di Seminar Antarabangsa Linguistik dan Pembudayaan Melayu VII (SALPBMVII), Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Malaysia.
Mat Hassan, A. F. & Hamzah, Z. A. Z. (2010). Pengkategorian peribahasa Melayu berdasarkan aspek nilai dan pemikiran: Satu analisis pragmatik. Selangor, Malaysia: Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Mohd Amin, N., Meor Hissan, W. S., & Abdul Rahman, N. A. (2013). It takes two to 'tangle' for Malay idioms, but does it also take 'two' to learn them? International Proceedings of Economics Development & Research, 74, 69-74.
Nunberg, G. (1978). The pragmatics of reference. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Pareira, V., Rickard Liow, S. J., & Mohd Saniff, S. (1992). Familiarity ratings for 530 Malay words. Working Paper No. 42, Department of Social Work and Psychology, National University of Singapore.
Mohamad Deli, R., Kamil, S. M., Mustafa, R., & Sarbini-Zin, M. (2013, December). Compositionality and familiarity rating of Malay idioms for research on figurative language. Paper presented at the Memory Conference Network, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia.
Mohamad Deli, R., Mustafa, R., & Sarbini-Zin, M. (2012). Word familiarity and lexical change: The case of Sarawak Malay dialect. Issues in Language Studies, 1(2), 17-23.
https://doi.org/10.33736/ils.1690.2012
Salehuddin, K. (2013). Arabic script of written Malay: Innovative transformations towards a less complex reading process. Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 21(S), 63-76.
Salehuddin, K. & Winskel, H. (2015). Experimenting different Jawi spelling conditions to gauge their cognitive complexity. GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, 15(2), 51-63.
https://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2015-1502-04
Salleh, M. R. (1999). Peribahasa dalam masyarakat Melayu satu analisis pemikiran dan cerminan falsafah. Selangor, Malaysia: Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Swinney, D. A., & Cuttler, A. (1979). The access and processing of idiomatic expressions. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 18, 523-534.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(79)90284-6
Tittone, D.A., & Connine, C. M. (1999). On the compositional and noncompositional nature of idiomatic expressions. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 1655-1674.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00008-9
Van de Voort, M. E. C., & Vonk, W. (1995). You don't die immediately when you kick an empty bucket: A processing view on semantic and syntactic characteristics of idioms. In M. Everaert, E.-J. Van der Linden, A. Schenk, & R. Schreuder (Eds.), Idioms: Structural and psychological perspectives (pp.283-300). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Weinreich, U. (1969). Problems in the analysis of idioms. In J. Puhvel (Ed.), Substance and structure of language (pp. 23-81). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520316218-003
Williams, J. N. (1992). Processing polysemous words in context: Evidence from interrelated meanings. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 21, 193-218.
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01068072
Yap, M. J., Rickard Liow, S. J., Jalil, S., & Faizal, S. S. (2010). The Malay Lexicon Project: A database of lexical statistics for 9,592 Words. Behavior Research Methods, 42, 992-1003.
https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.42.4.992
Zahid, I. (1998). Peribahasa Melayu: Satu klasifikasi yang tiada penentu. Jurnal Dewan Bahasa, 42(11), 978-984.
Copyright Transfer Statement for Journal
1) In signing this statement, the author(s) grant UNIMAS Publisher an exclusive license to publish their original research papers. The author(s) also grant UNIMAS Publisher permission to reproduce, recreate, translate, extract or summarize, and to distribute and display in any forms, formats, and media. The author(s) can reuse their papers in their future printed work without first requiring permission from UNIMAS Publisher, provided that the author(s) acknowledge and reference publication in the Journal.
2) For open access articles, the author(s) agree that their articles published under UNIMAS Publisher are distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, for non-commercial purposes, provided the original work of the author(s) is properly cited.
3) For subscription articles, the author(s) agree that UNIMAS Publisher holds copyright, or an exclusive license to publish. Readers or users may view, download, print, and copy the content, for academic purposes, subject to the following conditions of use: (a) any reuse of materials is subject to permission from UNIMAS Publisher; (b) archived materials may only be used for academic research; (c) archived materials may not be used for commercial purposes, which include but not limited to monetary compensation by means of sale, resale, license, transfer of copyright, loan, etc.; and (d) archived materials may not be re-published in any part, either in print or online.
4) The author(s) is/are responsible to ensure his or her or their submitted work is original and does not infringe any existing copyright, trademark, patent, statutory right, or propriety right of others. Corresponding author(s) has (have) obtained permission from all co-authors prior to submission to the journal. Upon submission of the manuscript, the author(s) agree that no similar work has been or will be submitted or published elsewhere in any language. If submitted manuscript includes materials from others, the authors have obtained the permission from the copyright owners.
5) In signing this statement, the author(s) declare(s) that the researches in which they have conducted are in compliance with the current laws of the respective country and UNIMAS Journal Publication Ethics Policy. Any experimentation or research involving human or the use of animal samples must obtain approval from Human or Animal Ethics Committee in their respective institutions. The author(s) agree and understand that UNIMAS Publisher is not responsible for any compensational claims or failure caused by the author(s) in fulfilling the above-mentioned requirements. The author(s) must accept the responsibility for releasing their materials upon request by Chief Editor or UNIMAS Publisher.
6) The author(s) should have participated sufficiently in the work and ensured the appropriateness of the content of the article. The author(s) should also agree that he or she has no commercial attachments (e.g. patent or license arrangement, equity interest, consultancies, etc.) that might pose any conflict of interest with the submitted manuscript. The author(s) also agree to make any relevant materials and data available upon request by the editor or UNIMAS Publisher.