An Experimental Research On Spatial Metaphor Of Social Status In Modern Chinese

Metaphor is not just a matter of language; on the contrary, it is a kind of cognitive style that is pervasive in everyday life. Our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The essence of metaphor is mapping the structure of source domain, which is one kind of thing that is familiar and concrete, onto the target domain, which is comparatively unfamiliar and abstract.Spatial metaphor is that mapping the concept of space onto the concept of non space. Spatial metaphor plays an important role in human beings cognition. By studying a large number of corpus, researchers found that many abstract concepts are constructed and understood through spatial concept, such as time, quantity, emotion, moral etc."Up/down", "big/small" is of the two common spatial concepts in our daily life. Human can use these words to describe the concept of social status in communication.Our research is under the background of the Second Generation of Cognition Science. Upon both the "Metaphorical concept theory" in Cognition linguistic and the "Embodiment theory"in Cognition Psychology. We've verified "the Spatial Metaphor of Social Status in Modern Chinese" by a psychological latency experiment, which then indicates that we not only talk about social status through space, the spatial foundation is also on conceptual thinking of social status.This research comprising four experiments that evaluate whether the social status is represented along two relevant metaphor dimensions:verticality and size.196 participants are undergraduate students of Shanghai Normal University in this research. Experiment 1 and 2 tested whether judgments of social status and information on a vertical location are interrelated. Experiment 3 and 4 sought to investigate online consequences in relation to an understood the concept of social status linking evaluation to size.Experiment 1 examined the implicit association between social status in modern Chinese and vertical position by IAT. The result showed that there have strong relations High social status-Up and Low social status-Down, the IAT effect is d=0.68.Experiment 2 we found that High social status words were evaluated more quickly and accurately when presented in a high position (F=2.974, p<0.05). Parallel and opposite effects were found for Low social status words (F=2.456, p<0.05)Experiment 3 established that people have implicit associations between High social status-Big and Low social status-Small, the IAT effect is d=0.55. Experiment 4 demonstrated that High social status words presented in a larger font size were evaluated faster (F=2.64, p<0.05), but this effect is not persists when Low social status words presented in a smaller font size (F= 1.98, p>0.05)These results reveal that vertical and size perceptions are invoked when people access social status-related cognitions. Moreover people tend to use vertical space instead of size to construct and understand social status.