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Emotive and sensory simulation through comparative construal

ABSTRACT Using authentic textual data from written personal narratives, we investigate how individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Tourette Syndrome mediate their emotive and sensory experiences through language. Our study reveals that experiential comparisons of different kinds (Trying not to tic is like trying not to blink) feature prominently as means of conveying such experiences. We identify a number of meaning domains that are recruited in correspondences between sources and targets, including motion and force, and detail how sensory modalities, bodily sensations, and emotions are exploited to evoke emotive/sensory responses in readers. We conclude that comparative construal is a significant communicative strategy precisely because it elicits familiar situational meanings capable of evoking vicarious experiences in readers. By considering texts from actual uses of language in natural situations, our research sheds new light on how emotive/sensory experiences are conveyed through language and furthers our understanding of means of effecting emotive/sensory descriptions beyond individual words. An explanatory framework for comparative construal is proposed—a three-dimensional similarity space—which accounts for such construal in terms of the nature of correspondences between sources and targets and intersubjective evaluation in the form of experiential, embodied simulation.