Cognitive Context And Metaphor Interpretation

Metaphor interpretation is a very important part in metaphor study.For many years, scholars and researchers have been trying from variousperspectives to study the process of metaphor interpretation. What isacknowledged is that the interpretation of metaphors depends greatly onthe context. This thesis tries to employ Sperber and Wilson's notion ofcognitive context in relevance theory to probe the role of cognitivecontext in metaphor interpretation.Cognitive context is quite different from the traditional concepts ofcontext. It does not refer to the static surroundings of the speaker, butdynamic and selective. It is a psychology construct covering humanbeings' observation and understandings of the representation of the world.Metaphor interpretation is a process of selecting and activating relevantassumptions in one's cognitive context to infer the speaker's intendedinformative intention with the least effort but the most contextual effect,under the relevance theory. That is to say, a very important part ofmetaphor interpretation is to select relevant information in one'scognitive context.In this thesis, the author divides cognitive context into four parts:linguistic knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge, situational context andcognitive abilities. To be more specific, we divide linguistic knowledgeinto lexical knowledge, discourse knowledge; encyclopedic knowledgeinto background knowledge and cultural knowledge; situational contextinto setting constraints and topic constraints to illustrate these factors' role in the selection and their impact on metaphor interpretation withspecific examples. Cognitive abilities, however, don't participate in theselective process, but they directly influence the structure and retention ofone's cognitive context, so they are also important to metaphorinterpretation. In the thesis, the author chooses two basic cognitiveabilities: perception and memory as examples to analyze how theyinfluence metaphor interpretation. Perception, as one of human's basiccognitive abilities is greatly influenced by culture. And culturalperception has an impact on people ability to perceive culturaldifferences, which will directly affect people interpreting process.Memory, as the effective tool of storing information, is closely associatedwith the retention of human's knowledge, which comprises theircognitive context.After analyzing the relationship between cognitive abilities andmetaphor understanding, the author emphasizes that in order to improvethe ability to understand metaphors one should try to enhance his culturalperception and memory.