A Study On The Effect Of Cognitive Context On Metaphor Understanding

As a kind of linguistic phenomenon, metaphor is pervasive in our daily life. It reflects and forms our concept system. It also plays an important role in our daily thinking and cognitive activities. In the long history of study on metaphor, the understanding of it has been an important aspect which depends greatly on the context. Based on the views of earlier scholars, the thesis tries to employ Sperber and Wilson’s notion of cognitive context in Relevance Theory to explore the role of cognitive context in metaphor understanding.In the traditional theories of context, all the contextual elements from a certain context are given before the communication. So the traditional context holds a static view. Relevance Theory changes the definition of the traditional context and regards the context as a psychological construction. The communicators internalize and cognize the relevant concrete context by experience or thoughts, which is the cognitive context. Metaphor understanding is a process of selecting and activating relevant assumptions in one’s cognitive context to infer the speaker’s informative intention with the least effort but the most contextual effect under Relevance Theory. That is to say, the process of metaphor understanding is to select relevant information in one’s cognitive context.First of all, the thesis gives a literature review of metaphor research. The unique perspective of Relevance Theory on metaphor is Brought up on the basis of surveying the prior studies. And theoretical framework of Relevance Theory is also introduced. More attention is paid to the viewpoints of metaphor in Relevance Theory. The part of cognitive context and metaphor understanding gives emphasis to the components and characteristics of cognitive context and the working mechanism of metaphor understanding. Then the thesis analyzes the effect of cognitive context on metaphor understanding. Cognitive context is divided into five parts:linguistics knowledge, situation knowledge, background knowledge, cultural knowledge and cognitive ability. Concerning linguistic knowledge, the thesis analyzes how to understand metaphor by using lexical and discourse knowledge. Situational knowledge is used for construing the effect of setting constraints and topic constraints on metaphor understanding. Background knowledge plays a pivotal role in the metaphor, especially in the field of science and technology. In the cultural knowledge, it mainly contains age features, animal images and religion influences on metaphor understanding. Cognitive ability, however, doesn’t participate in the selective process but directly influence the structure of one’s cognitive context. Combined with instances, the influence of constituent elements of cognitive context on metaphor understanding is illustrated respectively. The thesis also puts forward the implications that culture perception and identifying ability give a stimulative effect on metaphor understanding during the teaching of reading comprehension.Under the framework of Relevance Theory, combining with examples, this thesis illustrates that cognitive context plays a directive role in metaphor understanding through the study of the effect of various elements. It is concluded that the process of cognitive context selection decides metaphor understanding and the degree of cognitive context perception decides how well metaphor is understood. Further, the study of cognitive context can help us to deepen the research of metaphor and to better understand how metaphor is expressed and understood in communication. Moreover, the thesis proves the mighty explanatory power of Relevance Theory.