A Corpus-based Analysis Of Context Effects On Metaphor Comprehension In Social Media

The rise of social media (such as Facebook, Renren net) provides abundant materials for language researches, especially for metaphor studies. As a platform to convey information and observe differences between cultures, metaphor, just like language, can be hardly understood without context. In metaphor research field on traditional media, context effects on metaphor comprehension has aroused wide concern, but still have some inadequacies.(1) In terms of global researches, the research materials in prior studies are mainly derived from written and spoken language, with less touch on cyber language; the previous research methods, such as behavior experiments, ERP can hardly avoid interferences from human factors and experimental environment; only few research findings thus far can explicitly explain how different types of context influence metaphor comprehension.(2) In terms of researches in China, Chinese metaphor comprehension studies mainly focus on the cognitive context effects on metaphor comprehension, without much consideration of linguistic context which directly affects metaphor comprehension;With the guidance of Metaphor Prediction Hypothesis (MPH) and classification of context proposed by James H. Martin, the current research builds a small Chinese social network corpus to observe Chinese social media metaphors in different types of contexts, namely the sentence-level context, discourse-level context and cultural context with the purpose of better understanding how different types of contexts affect metaphor comprehension in social media,. To be specific, the observation on sentence-level context will be achieved by conducting three sets of measurements according to further classification of sentence-level context proposed by Martin, that is, contexts containing literal expressions about the source concept, contexts containing literal expressions about the target concept, and finally, contexts containing metaphoric expressions, so that concrete values and figures can be generated which suggest, to what extent, different types of sentence-level contexts exert effects on metaphor comprehension. The results of measurements imply that contexts containing metaphors with the same basic structure of the following metaphors facilitate metaphor comprehension most efficiently; the contexts containing literal expressions about target concepts of the following metaphors facilitate metaphor comprehension to a certain degree, while contexts containing literal expressions of source concept show little facilitation in metaphor comprehension. Furthermore, some examples of discourse-level context are employed to illustrate that some characteristics of social media discourse, including tendency of colloquialism, diversity in genre, diversity in topic selection, affect metaphor comprehension in social media. In the last part, also by virtue of example, the effect of cultural contexts on Chinese metaphors comprehension in social media is discussed from aspects of Chinese traditional culture, social ideology in China and network culture. In general, the study of context effects on Chinese social media metaphor comprehension, in narrow sense and broad sense, may contribute to uncovering the relation between metaphor comprehension and context, providing an effective way to increase daily and online communication, and improving cultural communication.