An Empirical Study On Identification And Interpretation Of Chinese Metaphor And English Metaphor

Metaphor, as an important language phenomenon in people's daily verbal communication as well as in literary works, has enjoyed a long discussion from philosophers, linguists, psychologists over 2000 years either in Chinese language or in English language. Those studies bore abundant fruits. And different schools and different classifications were put forward. Thus those efforts opened a door to the nature of metaphor theoretically to certain degree. But it mainly focused on its theoretic area, little evidence has been found to prove those theories. In contemporary study, a new approach has been applied to the study of metaphor interpretation, namely, experimental pragmatics.Based on the experimental pragmatics framework, an on-line questionnaire is designed and carried out and all the questions and their reaction time are recorded, in hope that we can make an attempt to answer the questions and hypothesis. The choice of materials would meet the purpose of analysis of different factors which may have an influence on metaphorical language understanding or interpretation, especially the familiarity of the materials, the chosen materials would be quite famous and masterpieces in literature both in Chinese and English. All the Chinese metaphorical examples and no-figurative examples were chosen from Fortress Besieged written by Qian Zhongshu, the world-famous Chinese scholar .All the English metaphorical examples and no-figurative examples were chosen from The Old Man and The Sea written by Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize winner for literature.The designed experiments and the whole thesis are hypothesized that: The students are more likely to recognize or spot Chinese metaphorical language faster than from English ones. The students with better academic performance achieve better results .According an on-line survey conducted among the Chinese college students, the author attempts to answer the following questions: Whether the students are more likely to identify or spot Chinese metaphorical language faster than from English ones; what are the possible factors for those college students to identify and interpret metaphor both in Chinese and English, such as their genders, their scale of familiarity with the materials , reaction time, and so on ?The main findings are listed as: Metaphor identification is greatly different from metaphor interpretation; Language proficiency plays an important role in identifying and interpreting metaphors; Familiarity with the context makes much difference when identifying and interpreting both Chinese and English metaphors; Reaction Time makes very little difference when identifying and interpreting both Chinese and English metaphors.