Empirical Research On The Cognitive Mechanism Underlying The Indication And Perception Of Deliberateness In Chinese Deliberate Metaphors

As an extension to Conceptual Metaphor Theory,Deliberate Metaphor Theory has attracted wide attention since its debut.Intense debates occurred between proponents and opponents on its defining traits and basic assumptions.These debates brought some consensus between the two stands,and facilitated the improvement of Deliberate Metaphor Theory.However,literature review indicated that deliberate metaphor research basically ignored the producers’ subjectivity,and how producers indicate deliberateness is still a research gap to date;although previous studies focused on receivers’ side,no direct supportive evidence for receivers’ perception has been provided;existing deliberate metaphor studies mostly approached it from communication dimension,ignoring its cognitive mechanism.As for the domestic research,regardless of the flourishing development of deliberate metaphor studies abroad,rare attention has been given to Chinese deliberate metaphors by domestic researchers.Under these contexts,this study puts forward four research questions:How do producers of Chinese deliberate metaphors indicate deliberateness? What cognitive mechanism at the levels of general cognitive abilities and executive functions is involved in deliberateness indication? How do receivers of Chinese deliberate metaphors perceive deliberateness? What cognitive mechanism at the levels of general cognitive abilities and executive functions is involved in deliberateness perception?To tackle these research questions,we enroll 70 native speakers of Chinese language from a university in China as producers,and another 70 as receivers,and implement six behavioral experiments with Chinese deliberate metaphors identified from a self-constructed corpus as testing materials.The results indicate: producers mainly rely on the novelty of metaphor and textual feature to indicate deliberateness in Chinese deliberate metaphors;the general cognitive abilities such as long-term storage and retrieval ability and general verbal knowledge are significantly correlated with Chinese deliberate metaphors’ indication of deliberateness;the executive functions such as responses inhibition and shifting of mental sets are also significantly correlated with Chinese deliberate metaphors’ indication of deliberateness;when perceiving Chinese deliberate metaphors,receivers pay more attention to the source domains and are more likely to adopt the intended perspective of Chinese deliberate metaphors;the general cognitive abilities such as fluid reasoning ability,short-term memory and general verbal knowledge significantly affect receivers’ perception of deliberateness;the executive functions such as updating of working memory representations and shifting of mental sets also significantly affect receivers’ perception of deliberateness.Moreover,the three major components of executive functions(responses inhibition,shifting of mental sets and updating of working memory representations)positively moderate the effect of the general cognitive abilities in Chinese deliberate metaphors’ indication of deliberateness,and only shifting of mental sets has positive moderating effect on the general cognitive abilities in perception of deliberateness in Chinese deliberate metaphors.The contributions of the present study are as follows:(1)This study incorporates producers into deliberate metaphor research.We testify the psychological reality of producers by the production experiment on deliberateness indication,and uncover the underlying cognitive mechanism by relevant cognitive behavioral experiments,compensating the ignorance of producers in deliberate metaphors studies.(2)This study provides direct supportive empirical evidence for receivers’ perception.We testify the psychological reality of addressees by the perception experiment on deliberateness,and uncover the underlying cognitive mechanism by relevant cognitive behavioral experiments,covering the shortage of direct convincing supportive evidence for deliberate metaphors’ perception.(3)This study takes a mixed approach of both quantitative analysis and qualitative discussion.Based on the quantitative results and findings,we construct producers’ model,receivers’ model and an integrative cognitive analyzing model for Chinese deliberate metaphors,attempting to further the theoretical discussion on its cognitive mechanism.In a nutshell,this study design cognitive behavioral experiments with Chinese deliberate metaphors,and approach them from the producers’ side,the receivers’ side and the cognitive mechanism,hoping to draw more attention to Chinese deliberate metaphors.Theoretically,this dual-subjectivity and intersubjectivity approach constructs a continuum between producers and receivers,aspiring to initiate intersubjective research on deliberate metaphors.Meanwhile,the verified cognitive abilities and executive functions unearth specific cognitive mechanism underlying deliberateness processing in deliberate metaphors.Practically,the combination of corpus analysis and behavioral experiments compensates the shortage of empirical studies on deliberate metaphors.