Chapter 10. Defaultness shines while affirmation pales: On idioms, sarcasm, and pleasure

-e Defaultness Hypothesis (Giora et al., 2015c) maintains that it is Defaultness that reigns supreme, superseding all factors known to a0ect processing initially, such as degree of Non/literalness, Non/salience, Context strength, or Affirmation. Here we focus on weighing degree of Defaultness against degree of Affirmation. We show that, as predicted, processing default, salient responses to familiar Negatives is faster than processing nondefault, low-salience responses to less-familiar A9rmative counterparts. We further show that, despite bene:tting from equally strong contextual support, default nonsalient Negative Sarcasm is processed faster than nondefault nonsalient A9rmative Sarcasm. 1 Using linguistic and pictorial contexts, we also demonstrate that it is Defaultness that accounts for Nondefaultness’ appeal, rendering it optimally innovative and hence pleasing. It is Defaultness, then, that singlehandedly a0ects both processing speed as well as likability.