The Psychological Reality of Chinese Deliberate Metaphors from the Reception Side: An Experimental Approach

Abstract

While the psychological reality of deliberate metaphors remains in ongoing doubt, this study attests to their psychological reality in the Chinese language. Based upon the definition and main tenets of deliberate metaphor, we propose three hypotheses: Compared with non-deliberate metaphors, addressees pay more attention to deliberate metaphors’ source domains, display a greater tendency to adopt the source domain’s perspective, and spend more time on processing deliberate metaphors. Using Chinese deliberate metaphors as testing materials, we conducted an experiment with 70 Chinese university students whose native language was Chinese. The results confirmed our hypotheses. Compared with non-deliberate metaphors, Chinese deliberate metaphors drew more attention and brought about more perspective changes. Additionally, processing deliberate novel metaphors consumed more time than processing non-deliberate metaphors, thus providing supportive evidence for the psychological reality of Chinese deliberate metaphors. However, less time taken on deliberate conventional metaphors than non-deliberate metaphors might have been caused by our experiment’s task design. In a nutshell, our study statistically proves the psychological reality of Chinese deliberate metaphors from the reception side. Future studies may check our findings with a similar experimental paradigm in other languages.