A Nominal Metaphorical Cognition Study Of Chinese L2Learners In Text-Reading

As a kind of linguistic phenomenon and a way of thinking, metaphor plays a very important role in people’s daily lives as well as literature. Therefore, many scholars have placed great importance on it. Previous research on metaphor has been conventionally restricted to the lexical and sentential level of language, but the understanding of it has been greatly depended on context.Based on the theory of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff&Johnson,1980) and the cognitive framework (Anderson,1995), the researcher designed a questionnaire to collect materials and conducted an empirical research to explore the influence factors in Chinese L2Learners’comprehension of noun metaphors and how the cognitive context influences the metaphor understanding by using various data analysis tools. This research questions of this study are as follows:1) in what aspects are the cognitive difficulties of Chinese L2learners on noun metaphor comprehension shown?2) Where do these difficulties originate?3) what are the potential influential factors that affect metaphorical cognition of Chinese L2learners?4) how can we cultivate and promote the Chinese L2learners’ cognitive competence of metaphors?We draw the following conclusions through empirical research. For individual factors:1) there are no significant relationship between these adult participants gender/age and its cognitive competence of metaphors;2) learners duration of Chinese learning and its HSK level are proportional to its metaphorical cognitive competence. For social and language environment:1) participants belong to Chinese-character cultural circle are of superior metaphorical cognitive competence to those from the opposite cultural circle, and individual’s mode of thinking and value orientation also have certain influence in metaphor understanding;2) language proficiency of adult participants can be easily affected by language environment, in other words, Chinese L2learners in China are of superior metaphorical cognitive competence to those out of China. We also find that Chinese L2learners’difficulties on understanding metaphors are mainly employed in the following three phases: perception phase (inexact discrimination of words and weak consciousness of self-control); parsing phase (infirm memorization of new words, meanings and grammatical rules; disproportionate allocation for task on time) and utilization phase (insufficient language competence, inadequate input of cognitive schema and lacking of whole cognition and reasoning).Based on above findings, the researcher concludes that the extent and depth of lexical metaphor, learners’metaphorical awareness, utterance and logical analysis of proposition should all be promoted to a higher level in order to overcome the listed difficulties. And on these basis, the researcher attempts to put some relative and practical methodological and pedagogical implications forward, and hopes that can benefit the development of Chinese L2teaching and learning.