Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.5, 2020

 

The Expression and Understanding of Metaphors from the Perspective of Cognitive Science

(Abstract)

 

Huang Huaxin

 

As one of the three important 20th century issues in cognitive science, the exploration of cognitive mechanisms through metaphors has received wide attention in many fields, including cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and natural language processing. Taking a cognitive semiotics perspective, this paper reexamines the expression and understanding of metaphors, regarding them as special kinds of linguistic symbols. Metaphors express non-literal meanings, so we cannot simply equate linguistic forms and semantic meanings with symbolic forms and the interpretation of symbolic forms respectively; instead, we need to form a multi-level chain of symbols to complete our interpretation while taking into account the cognitive environment and psychological process. From the point of view of information flow in situation semantics, the process of interpreting metaphorical symbols essentially depends on the flow of information. On the one hand, constrained by specific metaphorical concepts, it realizes a horizontal information flow between the source and target domains; on the other, constrained by specific metaphorical concepts, it achieves a horizontal information flow between the source and the semantic field to realize a vertical information flow from the upper to the lower concept. Finally, reconstructing the information flow of metaphorical expression and understanding demonstrates the way in which the processing of metaphorical information highlights the relevance, integrity, divergence and uniqueness of thought, as well as the interaction of these attributes.