Creation Of Metaphors About Actions And Emotions: Psycholinguistic Evidence In Chinese Adults

Since Aristotle's era, the concept of metaphor has been falsely understood as separate from everyday language or literal meanings. Cognitive linguists criticized this traditional view of metaphor and studied metaphor from a cognitive perspective, that is, metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Due to the inadequacy of the traditional metaphor theories and the pragmatic view, the present study adopts the cognitive view of metaphor to explore Chinese adults' metaphor production ability of emotion and action targets under comparative and nominal instructions. Through analyzing the metaphor production by participants, this study reveals the factors that elicit participants' metaphor production, how they construct concepts of emotion and action, how Chinese culture influences their conceptual metaphor, etc. Thus, it has significance and implications for both cognitive linguistic theory and language teaching theory and practice.This thesis will address the following three questions: (1) Do different types of instruction influence participants' productions of metaphor in their native language? If they do, what are the differences? (2) Are there any differences between the metaphor production in the descriptions of emotion and action in native language? If there are, what are they? (3) What are the differences between the conceptual metaphor productions of different target domains? What are these conceptual metaphors' characteristics? The present study uses an elicitation task to investigate Chinese adults' ability of metaphor production of emotion and action targets under comparative and nominal instructions.The findings are briefly summarized as follows: (1) Comparative instruction triggers more metaphor production than nominal ones. (2) Emotion targets elicit more metaphor than action ones; (3) Conceptual metaphors that could be analyzed from the participants' metaphor production have the following characteristics: (a) there are more source domains mapped onto emotion than to action; (b) Chinese culture has influence on participants' metaphor production; (c) participants frequently use Chinese idioms in both targets under both types of instructions; (d) there exists hierarchy within emotion category; (e) participants frequently use animal metaphor, especially for action target; (f) single type of conceptual metonymy production; (g) metaphor production further shows the embodiment of conceptual metaphor.This study has the following implications: (1) theoretically, more research should be done on the definition and classification of metaphor and metaphor corpora should be built for future study; (2) methodologically, more analysis language of use should be conducted in future research; (3) pedagogically, application of theoretical findings should be enhanced in future study.