Processing of Conceptual Metaphors in Mandarin Chinese -- A Conceptual Mapping Model Based Study
| Autor: | Dora Hsin-yi Lu, 盧欣宜 |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2002 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 90 Keywords: metaphor processing, Chinese Conceptual Metaphors, Conceptual Mapping Model The main purpose of this thesis is to answer the questions “Do different metaphor types influence the speed of metaphor comprehension?” and “Will different kinds of metaphor also differ in the literal truthfulness judgment task?” We believe that the discrepancies in previous studies come from blurring metaphor types. By looking at the reaction time that people take to process these different metaphor types, we are able to test the existing metaphor processing models and to find a psycholinguistic model that can best explain the available linguistic data. In order to answer the questions we asked above, we follow Ahrens (2002) proposal of a Conceptual Mapping Model for metaphor processing. In this model, there is an underlying reason (mapping principle) for each metaphor, and these mapping principles cast constraints on the source domain and target domains, which also explains why certain target or source domains are selected. The model further distinguished metaphor into three types. The three types of metaphors under investigation are ‘Conventional metaphor’, ‘Novel metaphors that follow mapping principles’, and ‘Novel metaphors that do NOT follow mapping principles’. Two experiments are included to see how people process these three types of metaphor. First is the whole sentence reading time experiment. We present the experiment stimuli auditorily, and measure how long people take to understand these sentences. We assume that there will be a decline RT over the three different metaphor types, which suggests that people process differently when encountering different metaphors. The other on-line experiment is a literal truthfulness judgment of metaphors, which provides us more information for the metaphor processing issue. Although metaphors are literal false statements, conventional metaphors are too well embedded in our conceptual system to be easily judged as literally false. People will need longer time to judge the conventional metaphor as literal false, unlike other novel metaphors, which will be quickly classified as literal false. The experiments’ results confirm the Conceptual Mapping Model. In the whole sentence reading time experiment, conventional metaphors are processed as fast as literal statements and they are very different from other types of metaphors. The literal truthfulness experiment shows that conventional metaphors are indeed more difficult to be rejected as literal false statements, and the error rate for conventional metaphors is higher than all other groups, which implies that conventional metaphors are embedded in our lexicon or conceptual system so that people made more mistakes when they are forced to classify metaphors from ‘metaphorical true’ to ‘literal false’ statements. From these experiments, we find evidence for different processing of these types of metaphor and verify a model which can best explains most of the linguistic data and solve the discrepancies found in previous studies. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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