中国英语学习者隐喻表达策略研究

English Metaphor Production Strategies Used by Chinese EFL Learners

本文以30名英语专业学生为被试,以翻译填空测试为工具,采用错误分析法,考察了中国英语学习者的隐喻表达策略。结果表明,学习者在表达英语隐喻时,除采用正确的目标隐喻外,往往采用多种策略对汉语隐喻进行加工,进而创造英语隐喻。这些策略包括常规表达、不完整表达、字面意义使用、同义词替代、L1文化迁移以及其他无关英语隐喻。这些策略的使用表明,学习者在无法产出正确的英语隐喻时,往往采用自认为相对可行或安全的(词汇或语法层面的)语言表达形式来建构目标隐喻。这体现了二语隐喻表达的"保守创造模型"。对比二语隐喻理解策略研究,"字面意义凸显假说"不适用于二语隐喻表达。

Using a fill-in translation test and recruiting 30 English majors as subjects, this article investigated English metaphor production strategies used by Chinese EFL learners through error analysis. Results showed that in the process of Chinese-English metaphor translation, the subjects employed several strategies to create English metaphors unless they had already known the correct target metaphors. These strategies included regular expressions, incomplete expressions, literal meanings, synonyms, L1 culture transfer and irrelevant English metaphors. The use of these strategies indicates that Chinese EFL learners try to construct the intended English metaphors in a form that they feel acceptable or safe(either at the lexical or grammatical level) when they are uncertain of the correct English metaphors, exhibiting a conservatively creative model in L2 metaphor production. In contrast to L2 metaphor comprehension strategy research, the Literal Salience Hypothesis doesn’t apply to L2 metaphor production.