比喻的认知理论研究综述

The Assessment of Theories of Metaphor

目前,认知心理学界公认有三种比喻理论:特征匹配理论、类概念形成理论和结构映射理论。特征匹配理论认为,研究比喻理解的一般方法就是将比喻作为比较,比较在目标概念与基础概念之间突出了原本潜在的模糊的类似性,这是一个特征匹配的过程。类概念形成理论认为,在比喻理解中句子字面的目标概念与基础概念并未直接对应,基础概念用于获取抽象的比喻类概念来表征一个原型成员,然后目标概念被赋予这个类概念。结构映射理论认为,目标概念与基础概念之间的跨范围映射是由抽象的比喻类概念作为中介的,因此比喻就是一种类比或者比较。

This paper presents the description and evaluation of more recent three different types of theories of metaphor admitted by all the psychologists, including feature matching model, categorization model and theory of structure mapping. The feature matching model argues thai the approach to metaphor comprehension treats metaphors as comparisons that highlight preexisting but potentially obscure similarities hetween the target and base concepts. The process is one of feature matching. On the categorization view, the literal target and base concepts of a metaphor are never placed in direct correspondence during metaphor comprehension. Rather, the base concept is used to access or derive an abstract metaphoric category of which it represents a prototypical member, and the target concept is then assigned to that category. On the structure mapping view, the cross-domain mapping hetween the target concept and the base concept is mediated by an abstract metaphoric category, thus metaphor is a kind of either analogy or comparison. Finally, the more sufficient, reasonable evaluations of the three models were presented.