For years, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) has been a cornerstone in metaphor research. However, recent findings in psycholinguistics and neurocognitive science reveal that the creation of novel metaphors is more complex than previously understood. This study conducted a metaphor completion experiment with 60 Chinese university students to examine their metaphor production capabilities. We built a metaphorical corpus containing 170,000 words produced by native English speakers and utilized MIP (VU) and Wmatrix for comparative analysis. The findings are as follows: 1) Second language (L2) learners’ metaphor production is primarily influenced by cognitive patterns rather than linguistic proficiency, leading to distinct differences in semantic categories and source domains compared to L1 speakers; 2) The novelty of metaphors is inversely correlated with L2 learners’ mastery of basic semantics, suggesting that novelty alone is an insufficient criterion for assessing metaphor quality; 3) Contrary to previous research, mental metaphors exhibit a bidirectional mapping process. Additionally, L2 learners demonstrate both conceptual and grammatical asymmetry within a hierarchical metaphor network, even while being influenced by mother tongue transfer. These findings challenge traditional evaluation standards in language teaching and emphasize the need for refined criteria to assess metaphor quality, which could enhance metaphor recognition and creation in machine learning and AI language models. Furthermore, exploring the cognitive mechanisms and interlanguage differences in metaphor creation can improve concept teaching and facilitate cross-cultural metaphorical communication.

Authors:
Ying He, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China

About the Presenter(s)
Ms. He is a postgraduate student in linguistics at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China.

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