Research Front and Future Prospect: A Bibliometric Study of Metaphor Comprehension

Abstract

Metaphor comprehension is an important component in the process of constructing metaphorical thinking. Therefore, the topic of “metaphor comprehension” should be a crucial part of metaphor studies. This study uses Bibliometrix to conduct a bibliometric study of research on metaphor comprehension from 2013 to 2023, focusing on the knowledge structure, the hot spots, and the research fronts. The co-citation analysis shows that the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (CTM) in Cognitive Linguistics has provided the dominant knowledge foundation for the research of metaphor comprehension. A large number of hypotheses from CTM not only provide theoretical guidance for the current understanding of metaphor but also provide a reference for experimental paradigms. The coupling analysis shows that most of the influential studies in the time span have conducted empirical studies, demonstrating the explanatory power of empirical results and the interdisciplinary trend of metaphor in psychology and neuroscience. In the past decade, theoretical approaches to metaphor comprehension have been divided into linguistic and interdisciplinary categories, in which different experimental paradigms and conditions were used to reveal the comprehension mechanism. However, while providing insights for metaphor comprehension study through the existing research results, the bibliometric analysis reflects that researchers should fully consider the gap between metaphor in use and metaphor in experiments. This may be mediated through the progress of metaphor comprehension models in different contexts. This study suggests that future research on metaphor comprehension should enrich their theoretical models, properly use or combine research methods and designs, and look into different types of research objects.