A Study On The Comprehension Of Emotion Metaphors In Social Media Weibo By Chinese College Students

The research of traditional metaphor believes that metaphor is only a rhetorical device for ornamental purposes,which is a deviation from ordinary language rules.However,in the 1980 s,there was a surge in metaphor research.Different from traditional metaphor views,contemporary metaphor studies associate metaphor with thinking.Therefore,metaphor is considered to be an important means of human cognition.It is a basic way of cognition and thinking to adopt familiar experience in one domain to explain and understand the experience in the other domain.Emotion,as an important part of human experience,is interdependent with cognition.However,as emotion is abstract,it cannot be expressed directly in a literal sense.Therefore,in order to accurately express an abstract emotion,people specify or conceptualize it through metaphor.In this case,metaphor plays an important role in the conceptualization of emotions,which makes the study of emotion metaphors also meaningful.Weibo is regarded as the representative of Chinese social media.As of 2019,the number of monthly active users of Weibo has reached 430 million,of which college students accounted for 72.3%.This open platform allows people to express their true feelings,which makes Weibo posts contain real and rich emotion metaphors.In addition,it is found that most of the previous research on emotion metaphors focused on the differences in the usage of emotion metaphors in different cultures.Few studies have paid attention to the understanding of emotion metaphors,let alone the understanding of emotion metaphors appearing in social media.Therefore,this article tries to discover and summarize the comprehension of emotion metaphors in Weibo posts by Chinese college students.It mainly aims to answer the following two research questions:1.How do Chinese college students comprehend different types of emotion metaphors in Weibo?2.What are the factors that affect Chinese college students’ comprehension of emotion metaphors in Weibo?According to the classification of conceptual metaphors,emotion metaphors in Weibo can be divided into three categories: structural emotion metaphors,orientational emotion metaphors and ontological emotion metaphors.The influencing factors of understanding metaphors can be summarized into three categories: material differences,goal differences and method differences.Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this thesis adopts the classification of emotion metaphors and the factors that influence the understanding of metaphors as dimensions in order to construct an emotion metaphor comprehension framework suitable for this research.The participants in this study are30 freshman e-commerce students from a university.The research materials are 20 Weibo posts,and each four Weibo posts correspond to the same basic emotion type:happiness,sadness,fear,surprise,or anger.Therefore,through quantitative analysis of the results of questionnaires,the 30 participants’ understanding of the three types of emotion metaphors and the recognition of the source and target domains are summarized.Then,through qualitative analysis of the results of interviews and questionnaires,the factors that influence the comprehension of emotion metaphors in Weibo posts are discussed.The research finds that: 1)Chinese college students have different understandings of three types of emotion metaphors in Weibo posts.In general,the recognition rates of the source domain and target domain in structural emotion metaphors,orientational emotion metaphors and ontological emotion metaphors reached 73.8% and 74.6%,74.7%and 48%,33.9% and 64.7%,respectively.For structural emotion metaphors,it is impossible to determine which domain is easier to identify.Therefore,in the recognition process,participants tend to mention two domains at the same time.For orientational emotion metaphors,participants understand the source domain better than the target domain.For ontological emotion metaphors,participants have a better understanding of the target domain than the source domain,and they tend to pay more attention to the source domain.2)There are three main factors that affect Chinese college students’ understanding of emotion metaphors in Weibo posts.The first factor is the emotions expressed in Weibo posts.Compared with the other three basic emotions,posts that express surprise and sadness have the highest recognition rate of emotion metaphors.The second factor is the types of emotion metaphors.Compared with the other two types of emotion metaphors,the understanding of structural emotion metaphors is the best,because participants tend to focus on vivid and concrete domains that appear directly in posts.The last factor is the context.In order to identify the emotion metaphors and emotions expressed in posts,the textual context plays a facilitating role for identification.This thesis investigates Chinese college students’ understanding of emotion metaphors in social media Weibo.Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory,it analyzes the thinking process in the understanding of emotion metaphor from a cognitive perspective.This research provides new research materials for the study of emotion metaphor,and the research results also provide inspiration for language learning.