Relevance-Theoretic Approach To Grammatical Metaphor Interpretation

The thesis is a relevance-theoretic approach to grammatical metaphor interpretation. The reason for studying grammatical metaphor is that most scholars of linguistics and philosophy would take a certain stand on the issue of lexical metaphor whereas few have actually committed themselves on the concept of grammatical metaphors except for occasional hint at the existence of grammatical metaphor. Still more pitiful, fewer scholars have commented on the complementary relationship between lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor in a cognitive sense. In addition that grammatical metaphor is usually seen as the use of metaphor, thus, a pragma-cognitive approach of grammatical metaphor will contribute to a seemingly complete picture of general metaphor study. This is why the framework of relevance theory is adopted.The account of metaphor in terms of loose use and relevance-driven processing has been, and continued to be, something of a breakthrough in the understanding of metaphor. Many researchers have recognized that essentially relevance-driven ad hoc concept-building process is involved in understanding metaphor. That is, relevance-driven ad hoc concept-building process may result in a concept whose extension includes entities not in the denotation of the lexicalized concept.From the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic, it can be inferred that what triggers the ad hoc concept building is the search for relevance (i.e. for enough implications, at a low enough processing cost, to satisfy the hearer's expectations of relevance). But there are still some questions to be answered concerning the on-line comprehension process: 1) How are these implications derived? The answer is that the path to reach the implication is by adding to the context encyclopedic assumptions made accessible by the encoded concept and enriching the encoded meaning into an explicit content that combines with these assumptions to yield the expected implications. 2) What direction does the process take? It follows a path of least effort, considering first the most highly activated contextual assumptions and implications (including those made salient by particular expectations of relevance). 3) When does the process stop? It stops when enough implications have been derived to make the utterance relevant in the expected way.In a word, the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic is an automatic inferential procedure for constructing such an interpretation by following a path of least effort in mutually adjusting context, explicit content and contextual implications (via both forward and backward inference) so as to make the utterance relevant in the expected way. The thesis will try to show that these strong pragmatic constraints on inferential comprehension play a central role in the derivation of superordinate categories in grammatical metaphor.After the theoretic elaboration of deriving superordinate category in grammatical metaphor interpretation, the thesis carries out a prime experiment to test the mental reality of the abovementioned superordiante category.The activation result of superordinate category demonstrated by this experiment supports the inferential process outlined in the thesis. Comprehending a grammatical metaphor makes properties that are central to the metaphor ground (and to the superordinate category of the vehicle) more accessible. Moreover, comprehending a grammatical metaphor makes properties of the basic-level meaning of the vehicle that are not relevant to its superordinate meaning less accessible. Thus, armed with the validation of superordinate category in grammatical metaphor interpretation, the present study is of much more explaining advantage.