The Strength of Source in Predicative Metaphor Comprehension

The purpose of the study was to investigate the characteristics of predicative metaphors and its comprehension way. Past literatures revealed that conventionality and aptness of metaphors influenced metaphor comprehension. In this research, it proposed a new concept called typicality of the source to classify the predicative metaphors. The idea of the typicality referred to the strength between the vehicle and its source. Typicality between the hidden source and its matched verb used might relate to the long-term memory and comprehension speed. The typicality of the source measured how representative the verb was for the implicit source. For instance, we were able to claim that “to fly” was the key feature of “bird”, but we could not say that “to boil” was a typical feature of “water”. This research contained two experiments. The first experiment was the rating tests in which the purpose was to find suitable Chinese predicative metaphors and classified them into groups according to aptness and typicality. The second experiment was to test the recalling numbers of metaphors, comprehension reaction time, and accuracy of the predicative metaphors. The result revealed aptness had the main effect and typicality had interaction effect with priming. This suggested the predicative metaphors might have a chance to process through the vehicle’s source.

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