Rethinking Linguistic Relativity in Idiomaticity: Conceptual Universals and Frames of Reference in Pragmatic Competence

The present chapter focuses on the connection between social cognitive skills and the ability to process non-compositional constructions, investigating whether social-cognitive skills are a cornerstone of successful pragmatic competence in general, and of successful metaphor comprehension skills in particular. Our experimental study targets the biologically determined and thus universal prerequisite of non-compositional meaning construction and demonstrates that our social-cognitive skills significantly improve performance in pragmatic tasks. We emphasize the role of such a universal trait in pragmatic competence but also highlight culture-specific traits of metaphor comprehension and of idiomaticity in general (Schnell and Ervas in Nat Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9:215, 2022). Our results confirm that metaphor comprehension (and idiomatic meaning construction in general) (Kövecses in Metaphor in culture: universality and variation. Cambridge University Press, 2005) heavily builds on social-cognitive skills (Schnell in Language in mind—Discourse and development. Academic Press, 2016), which also suggests that this skill is more universally determined and stabilizes at the same age across cultures, when the prerequisites for productive pragmatic skills are in place (Schnell in Hungarian humour. Humor and culture 3. Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies, pp 235–253, 2012; Schnell in Fuzzy boundaries in discourse studies—Perspectives on theoretical, methodological, and Lexico-grammatical fuzziness. Palgrave Macmillan, pp 151–181, 2019).