Michl Diana
Department Linguistik, Universität Potsdam/Freie Universität Berlin, Potsdam/Berlin, Germany.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2019 Dec;48(6):1285-1310. doi: 10.1007/s10936-019-09658-7.
It is widely acknowledged that fixed expressions such as idioms have a processing advantage over non-idiomatic language. While many idioms are metaphoric, metonymic, or even literal, the effect of varying nonliteralness in their processing has not been much researched yet. Theoretical and empirical findings suggest that metonymies are easier to process than metaphors but it is unclear whether this applies to idioms. Two self-paced reading experiments test whether metonymic, metaphoric, or literal idioms have a greater processing advantage over non-idiomatic control sentences, and whether this is caused by varying nonliteralness. Both studies find that metonymic and literal idioms are read significantly faster than controls, while the advantage for metaphoric idioms is only tenuous. Only experiment 2 finds literal idioms to be read fastest of all. As compositionality of the idioms cannot account for these findings, some effect of nonliteralness is suggested, together with idiomaticity and the sentential context.
人们普遍认为，习语等固定表达方式在处理上比非习语性语言具有优势。虽然许多习语是隐喻性、转喻性的，甚至是字面意义的，但在其处理过程中不同程度的非字面性所产生的影响尚未得到充分研究。理论和实证研究结果表明，转喻比隐喻更容易处理，但尚不清楚这是否适用于习语。两项自定步速阅读实验测试了转喻性、隐喻性或字面性习语是否比非习语性对照句子具有更大的处理优势，以及这是否是由不同程度的非字面性引起的。两项研究均发现，转喻性和字面性习语的阅读速度明显快于对照句子，而隐喻性习语的优势则较为微弱。只有实验2发现字面性习语的阅读速度是所有习语中最快的。由于习语的组合性无法解释这些发现，因此表明非字面性、习语性和句子语境都产生了一定的影响。
