An Empirical Study On Psychological Process Of Deliberate Metaphors

Deliberate Metaphor Theory(DMT)is a new “metaphor” theory formally proposed by Gerard Steen from 2010 to 2015.This theory is developed with the combination of Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT)and discourse practice,and emphasizes the importance of the consciousness and communicative function of metaphors.Based on the two-dimensional nature of CMT(language and concept dimensions)and its shortcomings,Steen established a three-dimensional model from three dimensions of metaphors,which are language,thinking and communication dimension,in which he distinguished deliberate metaphor(DM)and non-deliberate metaphor(NDM).DMT has two basic assumptions: one is that deliberate metaphors are a special category of metaphor which can arouse language users’ attention to the source domain;the other is that deliberate metaphors reveal that metaphors are not only reflected in language and thought but also in communication.Although studies abroad on DMT have involved empirical studies(Ng & Koller,2013;Beger,2016;de Vries et al.,2018),however,DMT has not attracted enough attention in domestic research fields of cognitive metaphor,cognitive linguistics,cognitive psychology,and cognitive neurolinguistics,and there is still a lack of empirical studies taking Chinese as the corpus to confirm and support its theoretical hypothesis.Therefore,this study attempts to verify the existence of DM based-on DMIPS and the theoretical hypotheses of DMT.The research questions are listed as followings: 1)Are the discourse participants of DM really paying attention to the source domain during the communication? 2)Are there any differences in cognitive effort in understanding and processing DM and NDM? If there is,what is the difference? 3)What are the reasons for this difference?The results of two experiments demonstrated that: 1)the statistical results of DM and NDM based on DMIPS verify the existence of DM in natural language.And there is a significant correlation between the degree of source domain attention and that of deliberateness;moreover,the positive correlation between the two is obtained from tau-b correlation coefficient,which directly confirmed Hypothesis 1 of DMT;2)whether it is under the premise of semantic consistency/inconsistency or not,the reaction time results based on E-prime stimulus-response convey that there are significant differences between the subjects’ understanding and processing deliberate metaphors and non-deliberate metaphors.Meanwhile,no matter whether the meaning is consistent or not,deliberate metaphors are significantly faster and better than non-deliberate metaphors;3)the reason for the difference in understanding and processing DM and NDM mainly lies in the explanation of communication,language and concept of DM.The communicative function of DM indicates that DM is a discourse strategy aimed at achieving a particular rhetorical effect and discourse purpose.The pragmatic function of DM shows that the speaker’s interpretation of a topic from the source domain referent plays a decisive role in obtaining the maximum linguistic effect.The analogical structure of DM demonstrates that the semantic processing of discourse conducted by DM from a single source domain perspective alleviates the cognitive efforts of discourse participants.The above results also confirm Hypothesis 2 of DMT.This study is the first cognitive study of DM and NDM using Chinese as the corpus,which not only provides basic objective experimental evidence for the cognitive research of DM and NDM in Chinese,but also lays a solid preliminary foundation for further electrophysiological experimental research of DMT in the future.