The Role Of Transfer And Familiarity In Comprehension And Production Of English Metaphors By Chinese First-year English Majors

This work is to examine whether L2 learners of English rely on their L1 (in this case Chinese) in their comprehending and producing metaphors in English and whether familiarity plays a decisive role in L2 learners of English performance in comprehending and producing metaphors in English. In translation task 1, a list of twenty sentences which contained metaphors in English was drawn up. Five metaphors had equivalent conceptual and equivalent or similar linguistic matches in Chinese; five had equivalent conceptual matches in Chinese but different linguistic forms from those in Chinese; five had different conceptual bases but equivalent or similar linguistic forms and five were totally different both in concepts and linguistic forms. In translation task 2, a list of twenty sentences in Chinese was also drawn up. These twenty sentences were Chinese correspondences to the twenty sentences in task 1. The subjects were forty-six freshmen majoring in English. With a translation test from L2 (English) to L1 (Chinese) and one from L1 (Chinese) to L2 (English) and a survey of familiarity with the metaphors to be tested, the following conclusions were reached: 1) Almost all subjects translated the metaphors into Chinese in task 1 and twenty Chinese sentences into English in task 2 and searched for a match, a) When metaphors had equivalent conceptual and equivalent or similar linguistic matches in Chinese, almost all subjects (except in cases of mistranslation) used their L1 to successfully comprehend the metaphors and produced the metaphors in L2, b) When metaphors had equivalent conceptual matches in Chinese but different linguistic forms from those in Chinese, a few subjects had difficulty in comprehending and producing metaphors, c) When metaphors were totally different both in concepts and linguistic forms, almost all subjects had difficulty, d) When metaphors had different conceptual bases but equivalent or similar linguistic forms, all subjects had difficulty. 2) Familiarity with metaphors in most cases facilitated the learners in comprehending and producing metaphors. However, when unfamiliarity occurred, L2 learners of English were able to use other strategies such as positive transfer from L1 to L2 tofulfill the task. In the case that no transfer could help, L2 learners of English sought other strategies or failed. The work finally concludes with a suggestion: Apart from cross-linguistic awareness-raising activities, systematic conceptual metaphor instruction can be used to teach L2 metaphors since a student cannot get very far when relying solely on his L1 to access individual metaphors in L2.