Gibbs R W, Kushner J M, Mills W R
Program in Experimental Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz 95064.
J Psycholinguist Res. 1991 Jan;20(1):11-30. doi: 10.1007/BF01076917.
Three experiments investigated the role of authorial intentions in metaphor comprehension. In these studies, subjects read metaphoric (e.g., "A family album is like a museum"), literal (e.g., "An art gallery is like a museum"), and anomalous (e.g., "A tortoise shell is like an art gallery") comparisons and rated their degree of meaningfulness (Experiment 1), made speeded decisions as to whether each phrase was meaningful or not (Experiment 2), or wrote out interpretations of each comparison statement (Experiment 3). The subjects were told that the comparisons were written either by famous 20th century poets or by a computer program that randomly generated the statements from a list of words. Our general hypothesis was that knowing that intentional agents (the poets) authored the different comparisons should facilitate subjects' comprehension of the metaphors. Experiment 1 showed that subjects rated both metaphoric and literal comparisons as being more meaningful in the poet condition than when these statements were supposedly written by computer. Experiment 2 demonstrated that subjects were faster in making their meaningfulness judgments for metaphors in the poet condition than in the computer context, but that subjects were also slower in rejecting anomalous comparisons when these were supposedly written by the poets. Experiment 3 indicated that subjects produced more meanings or interpretations for comparisons presumably written by poets than by computer. These results highlight the importance of implied, authorial intentions in understanding metaphorical statements. We discuss the implications of this work for psycholinguistic theories of figurative language comprehension, as well as for theories of literary interpretation.
三项实验研究了作者意图在隐喻理解中的作用。在这些研究中，受试者阅读隐喻性的（例如，“家庭相册就像一座博物馆”）、字面的（例如，“艺术画廊就像一座博物馆”）和异常的（例如，“龟壳就像一个艺术画廊”）比较，并对其有意义程度进行评分（实验1），快速判断每个短语是否有意义（实验2），或者写出对每个比较陈述的解释（实验3）。受试者被告知这些比较是由20世纪著名诗人所写，或者是由一个计算机程序从单词列表中随机生成的。我们的总体假设是，知道有意向的主体（诗人）创作了不同的比较应该会促进受试者对隐喻的理解。实验1表明，受试者认为诗人创作条件下的隐喻性和字面性比较都比这些陈述被认为是由计算机编写时更有意义。实验2证明，受试者在诗人创作条件下对隐喻的意义判断比在计算机情境下更快，但当异常比较被认为是由诗人所写时，受试者拒绝这些比较的速度也较慢。实验3表明，受试者对可能由诗人而非计算机编写的比较产生了更多的意义或解释。这些结果凸显了隐含的作者意图在理解隐喻陈述中的重要性。我们讨论了这项工作对 figurative language comprehension 的心理语言学理论以及文学解释理论的影响。
