Psycholinguistic Interpretation Of Metaphor

Metaphor, or the means by which one thing is described in terms of something else, has been described as a central tool of human cognitive apparatus. Metaphor in one form or another is absolutely fundamental to the way language systems develop over time and are structured, as well as to the way human beings consolidate and extend their ideas about themselves, their relationships and their knowledge of the world. Consequently, the study of metaphor has been of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, philosophy and literature. The present thesis points out that psycholinguistic interpretation of metaphor requires the understanding of identification procedures and descriptive categories, and the elaboration of representation and emergence of figurative and non-figurative features.The theory of Lakoff and Johnson is revolutionary in the sense that it brings the notion of conceptual primacy to the fore. They argued for a new theory of human conceptual organization which received the name of "experientialism", in which metaphor is considered as a fundamental cognitive process, as a basic schema by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world. The psycholinguistic interpretation of metaphor necessitates the clarification of the way to distinguish between different kinds of metaphors in language, the analysis of two levels of metaphor as a mental phenomenon, and the identification of both the process and the linguistic metaphors. On this basis, this thesis presents the psycholinguistic interpretation of linguistic metaphors in discourse data.The elaboration of representation and emergence of features in metaphor can provide an important insight into the psycholinguistic mechanics of metaphor comprehension. Meanwhile, two experiments have been conducted to test the validity of the Black's interaction theory. The first experiment is designed to determine which types of features are activated in understanding metaphor, and the second experiment is to determine which features are activated, during metaphor processing, by using chronometric techniques and executing a recognition task. The...