FUNCIONALIDAD

Intensive debates have been involved in exploring how metaphors are comprehended in comparison to how literal statements are comprehended. Four different views can be retrieved from the relevant studies. They are the sequential view, the direct view, the parallel view, and the combined view:

3.1.1 The Sequential View

It was traditionally believed that metaphors should demand greater cognitive efforts to be understood than literal sentences demand. (see e.g., Clark and Lucy, 1975; Grice, 1975; Searle, 1979) According to the so-called standard pragmatic model of metaphor processing (Grice, 1975; Seale, 1979), a special metaphorical understanding process only starts when the metaphor addressee realizes the literal incongruity of a metaphorical utterance. In other words, any utterance including a metaphorical one will first be processed as if it were literal. Only when the literal interpretation fails to reveal the meaning of the metaphor is a non-literal interpretation process initiated.

Thus, understanding metaphor involves several stages, including first the recognition of incompatible truth after the attempt of the literal interpretation and then the reconstruction of possible meaning and proper interpretation of the utterance (Miller, 1979). Such a view is also called the sequential view of metaphor comprehension. In the sequential view, a non-literal interpretation will never occur unless it is incongruent with the truth. In other words, metaphor comprehension does not occur directly but takes places only when the literal understanding fails to attain the true meaning of the metaphor. As a consequence, understanding metaphors takes longer than understanding literal statements, demands more cognitive effort, and involves qualitatively different processes.

3.1.2 The Direct View

A large number of empirical works have been understood as refuting the assumption that literal processing is obligatory and necessarily prior to metaphorical processing (e.g., Glucksberg, Gildea and Bookin, 1982; Keysar, 1989). It has been claimed by a number of researchers that metaphors are interpreted directly and that the cognitive understanding processes of metaphorical and literal language are essentially the same. For instance, Gibbs’s direct access model (DAM) (1994) suggests that metaphor comprehension requires the same processes as the understanding of literal language. He claimed that “[the] psychological research …clearly shows that listeners do not ordinarily devote extra processing resources to understanding metaphors compared with more literal utterances” (Gibbs, 1994: 232).

Gibbs (1994) further argued that difficulties in processing metaphorical language is a function of contextual support needed for establishing correspondent mappings from the source domain (vehicle domain) to the topic domain. Since literal meaning is predominant in the interpretation of de-contextualized sentences and metaphorical meanings require realistic contexts, when no context is provided, literal sentences seem to be more easily understood than the metaphorical sentences. However, the difference in comprehension time required to access the literal meaning and the metaphorical meaning can be greatly reduced when relevant contextual supports are provided. That means that the contextual supports can greatly facilitate the mapping process from the source domain to the target domain in understanding a metaphor. In addition to Gibb’s own experimental studies, the ERP data collected by Pynte,

Besson, and others (1996) also confirmed this claim that difficulty in understanding metaphors is largely due to the unavailability of contextual support.

Moreover, a number of other empirical studies also suggest that metaphors do not have to take longer to comprehend than literal statements when sufficient context is provided. (e.g., Cacciari and Glucksberg, 1994; Gibbs, 1994, 2001; Gibbs and Nagaoka, 1985; Glucksberg, 1998; Martin, 1994; Rumelhart, 1979; Shinjo and Meyer, 1987). Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds and Antos (1978) measured the time it took for subjects to comprehend literal sentences versus metaphorical sentences at the end of long and short contexts. They found that there was almost no time difference between understanding literal or metaphorical sentences if the metaphorical sentences appeared in long contexts, although subjects took significantly longer to read them than they did to read literal sentences in short contexts. Likewise, Janus and Bever (1985) tracked eye movements and compared the amount of time people spent being focused on the target sentences. Subjects again responded to the metaphorical sentences as quickly as literal sentences in the long context condition. Moreover, a number of other studies also showed that metaphorical utterances can be understood as fast as the literal utterances if sufficient supporting context can be provided (Inhoff, Lima and Carrol, 1984; Ortony, Shallert, Reynolds and Antos, 1978). These results contradicted the Searlean sequential model of metaphor processing. Additionally, based on the differing results in the long v. short context conditions, they rejected the possibility that metaphorical contexts are 'chunked' and processed as semantic units. Otherwise, metaphors should have been retrieved in nearly equal times for both short and long context conditions, if metaphorical context were chunked in a fashion similar to how lexemes are processed.

Coulson and Van Petten’s (2002) continuity claim suggests that both literal and metaphoric language processing “occur in the same course and involve the same processing mechanism” (Coulson and Van Petten, 2002: 959). However, they strongly rejected the view that metaphoric language is no more difficult to comprehend than literal language is. (ibid.) In their opinion, metaphorical language requires greater cognitive effort for processing, although literal and metaphorical language may take the same amount of time to comprehend. In their experiments (Coulson and Van Petten, 2002), they found that metaphors elicited larger N400s than did literal sentences. This suggests that subjects expended more effort in

metaphor comprehension than literal understanding. Moreover, they also discovered that metaphors generated a larger positivity than literal statements did at parietal, parietotemporal and occipital sites. These results have proved neuropsychologically that metaphor comprehension involves the establishment of mapping among more distantly related domains and in a more complicated integration cognitive process. Moreover, Coulson and Matlock’s (2001) experiment finding that more unique features are generated in metaphorical than in literal mapping contexts suggests that metaphor processing involves more elaboration in the blending operations.

Likewise, many other scholars also realized that metaphor comprehension may cost more cognitive effort. As stated by Noveck (2001), understanding metaphors often comes up with more costs in comparison to understanding non-figurative statements. The extra costs can be reflected by the longer time taken to understand metaphorical than literal utterances. Gerrig and Healy’s experiment (1983) is one example which demonstrated that reading metaphors takes longer than reading synonymous formulations. However, Noveck also pointed out that the extra costs (cognitive effort) in understanding a metaphor also bring out extra benefits (cognitive effect). That is perhaps why a metaphoric conclusion at the end of a paragraph leads to higher (immediately and delayed) “memorability” of both the conclusion and its context than does a literal conclusion (Reynolds and Schwartz, 1983).

3.1.3 The Parallel View

There are also metaphor researchers who adopted a parallel view of metaphorical and literal comprehension that both the literal and metaphorical meaning are involved in parallel in understanding a metaphor. Through investigating whether metaphorical or literal interpretation of a text may produce stroop-like interference, Keysar’s research (1989) has suggested that metaphorical and literal interpretation may well at least share component subsystems. Moreover, Gibbs’ studies (1980, 1986) have shown that subjects take less time to read idiomatic phrases when the context supports an idiomatic interpretation than they do to read the same phrases in contexts supporting a literal interpretation. This suggests that comprehension processes of literal and metaphorical language operate in parallel, depending on which process the context primes.

Using the cross-modal priming technique, Blasko and Connine (1993) found that metaphors whose metaphorical and literal meanings are equally salient are

processed initially both literally and metaphorically. Such a result was confirmed by Giora and Fein’s (1999) findings. According to them, both literal meaning and metaphorical meaning were activated in parallel in comprehending familiar metaphors. Since the literal and metaphorical meanings of familiar metaphors are similarly salient, they must share similar comprehension processes. However, the metaphorical meanings of novel metaphors are usually non-salient. As a matter of fact, they should take longer to read than their literal paraphrases.

3.1.4 The Combined View

Recently, metaphor researchers (see e.g., Giora, 1997) started to notice that the metaphors adopted in most empirical studies which support the direct metaphor comprehension processing are conventional metaphors. In this sense, the direct processing view of metaphor comprehension is an oversimplification, because the claim of the equal cognitive effort required by the literal and metaphorical texts could be applicable to conventional metaphors, but not to novel metaphors.

In Giora’s (1997) opinion, whether the comprehension of metaphors, in comparison to the literal statements, involves different process (direct/ parallel/ sequential) depends on the types of metaphors involved. In his words, “the direct/ sequential process debate, then, can be reconciled: Different linguistic expressions (salient- less salient) may tap different (direct/ parallel/ sequential) processes” (Giora, 1997: 183).

Bowdle and Gentner (2005) agreed with this view and argued that metaphor comprehension could involve either direct or indirect processing, with the conventional metaphor usually processed as direct categorizations and novel metaphors as indirect comparisons. Moreover, their empirical experiments show that the conventional metaphors are understood more rapidly than novel metaphors are.