To understand a nonliteral speech act, we must be able to differentiate what the speaker says from what he wants to say using the contextually relevant information. The aim of this study is to determine whether there exists a hierarchy of complexity across various nonliteral speech acts such as: violations of the maxim of relation, violations of the maxim of quantity, indirect requests and ironic statements. The analysis of reading time of the target sentences (56 literal and 56 nonliteral) of the stories indicates some differences in the processing of some nonliteral speech acts for comprehension. More precisely, indirect requests appear to be processed differently from the three other types of speech acts and subjects appear not to perceive violations of the maxims of quantity as nonliteral speech acts.
Psycholinguistics; Nonliteral meaning; indirect requests; conversational maxims
