An Empirical Study On The Comprehension Model Of English And Chinese Nominal Metaphors

Metaphors are pervasive in everyday language. A large number of researchers in the field of linguistics, psychology, and psycholinguistics have been interested in metaphor due to its universal existing. The review of metaphor comprehension investigation reveals that most of the studies in psycholinguistics are concerned with the interpretation process of nominal metaphors, representing as "A is B" syntactically. Based on the assumption that the metaphorical meaning is accessed directly as literal statements, two metaphor interpretation theories are proposed in psycholinguistics, i.e. property comparison theory and property attribution theory. Actually, relevant empirical investigations have been conducted to verify the assumptions of the two theories, but studies on cross lingual comparison are rare. Meanwhile, factors like the potential influence of conceptual metaphor that may contribute to the interpretation of nominal metaphor are also ignored. Setting the assumption that metaphorical meaning is accessed directly as the theoretical framework in psycholinguistics, the present paper aims to investigate the comprehension model of nominal metaphors for Chinese EFL college students (experiment one) and the potential influence of conceptual metaphor (experiment two). The language type (Chinese and English) and material type (rhetorical nominal metaphor and conceptual nominal metaphor) will be taken as the random variables for both the two experiments.The two experiments are on-line studies. Through recording the response time for the target nominal metaphors, and the response time and accuracy for the following verification statement judgment, two interrelated experiments are conducted to seek insight into the nominal metaphor interpretation by Chinese learners.83EFL undergraduates are randomly chosen from Southwest University as the participants. Among them,40students participate experiment one, while the rest43take part in the second experiment. In the two experiments, both the response time and accuracy are recorded by the E-prime software, and the data is submitted to statistical analysis by SPSS16.0. After the data collection and analysis, this study mainly obtains the findings listed as follows.Firstly, after comparing participants’ mean response times of understanding target nominal metaphors primed by four different sentences with the baseline (i.e. the time to interpret nominal metaphors without any primes) in experiment one, it is reported that comprehension facilitation produced by topic ground-relevant property, topic ground-irrelevant property and vehicle ground-relevant property primes are significant in Chinese, while a large reduction in comprehension facilitation (to a level below the base line) occurs to target metaphors primed by vehicle ground-irrelevant properties both in English and Chinese. This finding infers that the comprehension model of Chinese nominal metaphors for Chinese EFL college students is in accordance with the assumptions of the attributive categorization model. However, though there are facilitation effects for ground-relevant property primes in English, a reduction in comprehension facilitation of topic ground-irrelevant property prime occurs. Given all that, it implies that the comprehension model of nominal metaphors in English for Chinese EFL students corresponds with neither the assumptions of the models from property comparison theory nor the attributive categorization model. This shows that nominal metaphor comprehension model differs in languages.Secondly, participants comprehend rhetorical nominal metaphors significantly faster than conceptual nominal metaphors both in English and Chinese in experiment one, which infers that there may be a potential influence of conceptual metaphor. Data in experiment two that compares the comprehension of paired nominal metaphors (i.e. rhetorical nominal metaphor and conceptual nominal metaphor) all primed by a same conceptual metaphor show that conceptual nominal metaphor are interpreted faster than rhetorical nominal metaphors at a significant level, thereby the existence of conceptual metaphor is confirmed. Findings in the two experiments indicate that conceptual metaphor is activated during conceptual nominal metaphor interpretation in Chinese and English, and hence exerts an influence on it.Thirdly, comparisons are conducted between language types in the two experiments, finding that the interpretation of nominal metaphors from Chinese and English by Chinese EFL students follow different models, but the comprehension of rhetorical nominal metaphor is faster than conceptual nominal metaphor in the two languages. However, the time for them to understand materials from English is significantly longer than Chinese. All those findings yield that similarities and dissimilarities coexist in human beings’ thought. More precisely, there are overlaps in the conceptual system of human beings, but the lack of conceptual fluency of EFL students in English may contribute to the ambiguity of nominal metaphor interpretation model.