Metaphor Comprehension By Chinese Learners Of English

In the field of metaphor research, metaphor comprehension has been a meaningful topic. Knowing how second language learners interpret metaphors can not only help us learn about how people understand metaphors, but also gain a better understanding of how human language is processed. Moreover, it will help us learn about how students’native culture interacts with the new cultures. Therefore, a research on how students comprehend foreign metaphors will help to develop their metaphoric competence, and further, promote their conceptual fluency, thus, improving our foreign language teaching and learning. With the theoretic framework of cognitive linguistics, second language acquisition, and bilingual lexicon representation, this dissertation aims to research on Chinese learners’comprehension strategies and comprehension competence in understanding English metaphors, as well as the effect of English proficiency on strategy use and comprehension. Undergraduate students from Zhejiang University took part in the study. Students were required to write down their comprehension answers and how they got the answers in interpreting the metaphors. Data were collected by analyzing students’ comprehension strategies and their comprehension answers. Results show that, first, Chinese learners of English mainly use sentence context, and literal meaning to understand metaphors, followed by using their English and native cultural knowledge. In addition, they also use structure analysis, mental image and guessing to interpret metaphors. The strategies indicate an analytic model of metaphor comprehension. Second, different metaphor types influence learners’comprehension. Metaphors with the same linguistic forms and same metaphoric concepts in Chinese and English are the easiest to understand. A positive transfer occurs from Chinese to English. Whereas, metaphors with the same linguistic forms but different metaphorical concepts in the two languages are most difficult to understand. A negative transfer is observed from Chinese to English. Third, learners’English proficiency has a significant effect on the strategies for metaphor comprehension. Learners with high English proficiency tend to use more English background knowledge in interpreting metaphors, while learners with low proficiency tend to rely more on their native cultural background knowledge. Those learners also tend to use more strategies, such as structure analysis, guessing, mental image, than high proficient learners, to make up for their linguistic proficiency in understanding metaphors. However, both groups prefer to use strategies of sentence context and of literal meaning, as no significant differences were achieved in the use of these two strategies between the two groups, verifying the "contextual effect" and "literal salience hypothesis" in second language learning theory. Fourth, English linguistic proficiency has a significant overall effect on metaphor comprehension, and interacts with metaphor types. To put it in detail, no significant differences were reached between the two groups in understanding metaphors with the same linguistic forms and metaphorical concepts in both languages. However, significant effects were achieved in the other three types of metaphors. This finding may indicate that the weight of inter-language not only depends on learners’foreign language proficiency, but also on the characteristics of the lexicons and concepts. Based on relevant literature and this study, the paper constructs a hierarchical respensentation model of metaphorical concepts, making up for the weakness of the current conceptual representation models. The follow-up study on Chinese students in the United States confirmed the findings that English metaphor comprehension is related to English linguistic proficiency and familiarity with English culture and conceptual knowledge.