Abstract：Metaphor is a common figurative expression in communication, which is important to improve the reading comprehension. This research investigates the major constraints on the comprehension of different types of English metaphors. Specifically, conceptual schemas, related knowledge and psychological association, which are inevitably involved in the process of English metaphor comprehension, will be analyzed in the thesis. Meanwhile, the relationship between cultural factor and contextual factor is to be described accordingly.

   The three research questions to be raised in this study are :(1) what are the major factors affecting the comprehension of English metaphors? (2)What are the interrelations among the factors that constrain the comprehension of English metaphors? (3)What is likely to be the more acceptable comprehension model of English metaphors? 

   To answer these questions, we hypothesized that cultural and contextual factors would constrain the comprehension of English metaphors. Specifically, it could be examined from two aspects :(1)the culture-mutual L2 metaphors are much less a drawback than the culture-specific ones.(2)The culture-specific L2 metaphors with particular context would be more easily understood than bare ones.

   In the thesis, two test papers were used to collect information on the comprehension of L2 metaphors and provide, answers to the above research questions. 90 subjects were chosen to participate in the experiment and ten of the participants’ test papers were invalid. The results revealed that, in both the interpretation task and the matching task, the subjects in the present study inclined to employ related L1 information to work out the correct answers. Both the quantitative and qualitative analysis provided overwhelming evidence to support the previous hypotheses that there indeed exist cultural and contextual constraints on the comprehension of English metaphors. That is to say, context and culture are the major factors constraining the understanding of the L2 metaphors.

Keywords: metaphor  cognition  cultural  context  English major

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

Chapter One Introduction-1

1.1 Research Purpose-1

1.2 Research Questions-1

1.3 Organization of the thesis-1

Chapter Two Literature Review-3

2.1 Cognition-based Approaches to Metaphor-3

2.3 Culture-based Approaches to Metaphor-4

2.4 Theoretical Framework of the Present Study-4

Chapter Three the Empirical Study-6

3.1 Research Design-6

3.2 Subject-6

3.3 Instrumentation-6

3.3.1 Structure of the Two Test Papers-6

3.4 Data Collection-7

3.5 Data Preparation and Analysis-9

Chapter Four General Discussion-11

4.1 Major Constraints on L2 Metaphor Comprehension-11

4.2 Other Important Findings-11

4.3 The Specific Cognitive Model of Comprehending L2 Metaphor-12

Chapter Five Conclusions-13

5.1 Conclusions-13

References-15

Appendix A：Instrument for the present research(Test Paper for Group A)-16

Appendix B：Instrument for the present research(Test Paper for Group B)-18