Metaphor Comprehension And Translation--From Relevance-Theoretic Point Of View

In relevance theory verbal communication is said to start with the recovery of a linguistically encoded sentence meaning, which must be contextually enriched to yield speaker's meaning. In this process, the hearer should, following a path of least effort, enrich it at the explicit level and complement it at the implicit level until the resulting interpretation meets his expectation of relevance. Recent work in relevance theoretic pragmatics develops the idea that understanding verbal utterances involves processes of ad hoc concept construction. The resulting concepts may be narrower or looser than the encoded concepts and considered to be the one the speaker intended as a constituent of the proposition expressed. This paper, aiming at demonstrating that the cognitive mechanisms underlying metaphor comprehension is not different from what is involved in understanding literally used language, explores two issues: (a) the applicability of this idea to the comprehension of metaphor; and (b) how to treat metaphor's implicatures information in translation. This paper consists of five chapters, the main contents are as follows: chapter one surveys a few prominent metaphor theories, discusses metaphor's meaning and purpose and put forward the research purpose; chapter two describes briefly the relevance theory; chapter three and four aim to demonstrate how to achieve optimal relevance through ad hoc concept construction in the'processes of metaphor and idiom (considered as a sub-set of metaphor in this paper) comprehension; chapter five suggests an image-centered approach to metaphor and idiom translation and offers a few examples.