Indirect Categorization as a Process of Predicative Metaphor Comprehension

Abstract

In this article, we address the problem of how people understand predicative metaphors such as “The rumor flew through the office,” and argue that predicative metaphors are understood as indirect (or two-stage) categorizations. In the indirect categorization process, the verb (e.g., fly) of a predicative metaphor evokes an intermediate entity, which in turn evokes a metaphoric category of actions or states (e.g., “to spread rapidly and soon disappear”) to be attributed to the target noun (e.g., rumor), rather than directly evoking a metaphoric category as argued by Glucksberg's (2001) categorization theory. We test our argument using two experiments, namely, offline comprehension and online priming. The offline comprehension experiment showed that interpretation of predicative metaphors had greater overlap with words indirectly associated with the verb than those directly associated with the verb. The online priming experiment demonstrated that indirectly associated words were activated during predicative metaphor comprehension, but directly associated words were not. These results provide convergent evidence for our argument, and thus the psychological validity of two-stage categorization as a process of predicative metaphor comprehension was confirmed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research C (No.20500234) from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Notes

¹The prediction about the relation between metaphor aptness and direct categorization is based on the findings on nominal metaphors that metaphor aptness facilitates the process of categorization (Glucksberg & Haught, 2006; Jones & Estes, 2006).

²Note that the original Japanese verb “kabiru” is a verb, although its English translation “go moldy” is a verb phrase.

³The combination of abstract nouns and specific verbs was found to be more metaphorical than other combinations (Torreano et al., 2005). This finding indicates that the predicative metaphors used in the experiment are appropriate for our purposes.