Chen Xianglan, Ren Hulin, Yan XiaoYing
Center for the Cognitive Science of Language, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China.
School of Foreign Studies, University of Science and Technology, Beijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Jul 27;13:916854. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.916854. eCollection 2022.
Current cognitively oriented research on metaphor proposes that understanding metaphorical expressions is a process of building embodied simulations, which are constrained by past and present bodily experiences. However, it has also been shown that metaphor processing is also constrained by the linguistic context but, to our knowledge, there is no comparable work in the domain of metonymy. As an initial attempt to fill this gap, the present study uses eye-tracking experimentation to explore this aspect of Chinese metonymy processing. It complements previous work on how the length of preceding linguistic context influences metonymic processing by focusing on: (1) the contextual information of both the preceding target words; (2) the immediate spillover after the target words; and (3) whether the logical relationship between the preceding contextual information and the target word is strong or weak (a 2 × 2 between-subject experiment with target words of literal/metonymy and logic of strong/weak). Results show that readers take longer to arrive at a literal interpretation than at a metonymic one when the preceding information is in a weak logic relationship with target words, although this disparity can disappear when the logic is strong. Another finding is that both the preceding and the spillover contextual information contribute to metonymy processing when the spillover information does more to the metonymy than it does to the literal meaning. This study further complements cognitive and pragmatic approaches to metonymy, which are centered on its conceptual nature and its role in interpretation, by drawing attention to how the components of sentences contribute to the metonymic processing of target words. Based on an experiment, a contextual model of Chinese metonymy processing is proposed.
当前关于隐喻的认知导向研究表明，理解隐喻表达是一个构建具身模拟的过程，这一过程受到过去和当前身体体验的限制。然而，研究也表明，隐喻处理也受到语言语境的限制，但据我们所知，在转喻领域尚无类似研究。作为填补这一空白的初步尝试，本研究采用眼动追踪实验来探索汉语转喻处理的这一方面。它通过关注以下几点，补充了先前关于前文语言语境长度如何影响转喻处理的研究：（1）前文目标词的语境信息；（2）目标词之后的即时溢出信息；（3）前文语境信息与目标词之间的逻辑关系是强还是弱（一项2×2的被试间实验，目标词分为字面义/转喻义，逻辑关系分为强/弱）。结果表明，当前文信息与目标词的逻辑关系较弱时，读者理解字面义的时间比理解转喻义的时间长，不过当逻辑关系较强时，这种差异可能会消失。另一个发现是，当溢出信息对转喻的作用大于对字面意义的作用时，前文和溢出语境信息都有助于转喻处理。本研究通过关注句子成分如何促进目标词的转喻处理，进一步补充了以转喻的概念本质及其在解释中的作用为核心的转喻认知和语用研究方法。基于一项实验，提出了汉语转喻处理的语境模型。
