Effect Of Context In Metaphorical Mapping Process

Ever since Aristotle, studies in metaphor have raised the great interest of researchin linguistic field. Numerous scholars have studied and written about the nature andfunction of it, which involved the field of philosophy, psychology and linguistics, etc.The main achievements are Aristotle's comparison theory, Quintillion's substitutiontheory, Richards and Black's semantic interaction theory, and Lakoff's cognitive theory.All the theories reflect the understanding of the essence of metaphor and lay a solidfoundation for the further exploration of the mystery of metaphor. Recently, the researchfocus of metaphor has shifted its orientation from its affective or rhetorical efficacy toits cognitive function. Namely, metaphor is not merely regarded as a kind of figures ofspeech and serves as a means to enhance language, but also as a language in useinvolving an intuitive perception of similarity out of dissimilarities. People's revivinginterest in metaphors' cognitive feature sparks off many linguists' theories on it. In thefield of cognitive psychology alone, there are a number of contenders for the bestmetaphor-- theory contest, among them being salience-imbalance theory (Ortony, 1979),and conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Outside of psychology,there are several other theories that are currently studied and debated, including speechact theory (Searle, 1969), semantic field theory (Kittay,1989), and relevancetheory( Sperber & Wilson,1986). However, only a few of them concern about theinfluencing factors in metaphorical mapping process, such as factors like categorizationand familiarity. According to the categorization approach (Glucksberg and Keysar,1990), for example, an apt metaphor is one which is prototypical to the ad hoc categorycreated by the interaction of vehicle and topic. So, in the metaphor "The ideas weregold" the vehicle 'gold' is being used as the name of an ad hoc category of 'things whichare rare and valuable'. Therefore, although there are many things that are rare andvaluable, including silver and platinum, metaphors like "The ideas were platinum." isnot quite as apt because platinum is not a prototypical member of the ad hoc category.Besides categorization as a factor influencing the mapping process, familiarity isanother variable. This theory (Katz et al., 1988) showed many words such as the 'leg' ofa table begin as a metaphorical extension and later became lexicalized becausefamiliarity breeds liking. Blasko and Connine (1993) found that highly familiarmetaphors showed immediate activation of the figurative meaning of the metaphor. Sofamiliarity also influences mapping process. Despite of factors above, context's role in the metaphorical mapping process isneglected, though it is very rare outside of the laboratory to encounter an isolatedmetaphor of the commonly studied "A is B" form because in most cases, metaphors areencountered within extended contexts. Su (2002) said that metaphor is a kind oflanguage in use and we can not find a metaphor in dictionary. (Ricoeur, 1997) MaxBlack (1971) in his MORE ABOUT METAPHOR states that "any attempt to be moreprecise about the identifying and individuating criteria for metaphorical statements willbe embarrassed by the following difficulty. Only in certain context can metaphor berealized. The very same metaphorical statement may appropriately receive a number ofdifferent and even partially conflicting readings in the absence of context."(Black,1971:36) Although they realize the importance of context in identifying metaphor, theydid not do the further study of the function of context in identifying and interpretingmetaphor. It seems that they have already taken context for granted, so there has beenless incentive for studying it scientifically; why should one develop a theory or carryout systematic observations about the obvious? In addition, the relationship of contextand metaphor is an interdisciplinary study concerning semantics and pragmatics; thecomplex exploration will not always be favored. Recently, however, some...