Chinese College Students' Understanding Of English Metaphors

This research investigates the major constraints on the comprehension of different types of English metaphors. Specifically, conceptual schemas, related knowledge and psychological association, which are inevitably involved in the process of English metaphor comprehension, will be analyzed in the thesis. Meanwhile, the relationship between cultural factor and contextual factor is to be described accordingly.The three research questions to be addressed in this study are: (1) what are the major factors affecting the comprehension of English metaphors? (2) What are the intenelations among the factors that constrain the comprehension of English metaphors? (3) Do the examinees provide a large variety of answers for culture-specific items than culture-mutual ones? What's the reason from a cognitive perspective? (4) What is likely to be the more acceptable comprehension model of English metaphors?To answer these questions, we hypothesized that cultural and contextual factors would constrain the comprehension of English metaphors. Specifically, it could be examined from two aspects: (1) the culture-mutual L2 metaphors are much less a drawback than the culture-specific ones. (2) The culture-specific L2 metaphors with particular context would be more easily understood than bare ones.In the thesis, two test papers were used to collect information on the comprehension of L2 metaphors and provide answers to the above research questions. 80 subjects were chosen to participate in the experiment and ten of the participants' test papers were invalid. The results revealed that, in both the interpretation task and the matching task, the subjects in the present study inclined to employ related L1 information to work out the correct answers. Both the quantitative and qualitative analysis provided overwhelming evidence to support the previous hypotheses that there indeed exist cultural and contextual constraints on the comprehension of English metaphors. Only based on the interpretation task, we could see clearly that: (1) on the understanding of English-specific metaphors, there exists a significant difference of mean scores between the English-specific metaphors without context of Class A and the...