Is Evoking Negative Meanings the Unique Feature of Adjective Metaphors? : Through the Comparison with Nominal Metaphors and Predicative Metaphors

Is Evoking Negative Meanings the Unique Feature of Adjective Metaphors? Miho Sumihisa (m_sumihisa@edu.hc.uec.ac.jp) Department of Human Communication, The University of Electro-Communications 1-5-1, Chofugaoka, Chofushi, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan Hiroya Tsukurimichi (h.tukurimichi@edu.hc.uec.ac.jp) Department of Informatics and Engineering, The University of Electro-Communications 1-5-1, Chofugaoka, Chofushi, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan Akira Utsumi (utsumi@se.uec.ac.jp) Department of Informatics and Engineering, The University of Electro-Communications 1-5-1, Chofugaoka, Chofushi, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan Maki Sakamoto (sakamoto@hc.uec.ac.jp) Department of Informatics and Engineering, The University of Electro-Communications 1-5-1, Chofugaoka, Chofushi, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan Abstract Previous metaphor studies have paid much attention to nominal and predicative metaphors and little attention has been given to adjective metaphors. Although some studies have focused on adjective metaphors, they have only examined how the acceptability of adjective metaphors can be explained by the pairing of adjective modifier’s and head noun’s modalities and little attention has been given to meanings evoked by adjective metaphors. Sakamoto & Utsumi (2009) showed that adjective metaphors, especially those modified by color adjectives, tend to evoke negative meanings. Thus, our study examines whether evoking negative meanings is the unique feature of adjective metaphors through the comparison with nominal and predicative metaphors for the Japanese language. Our psychological experiments revealed that meanings of metaphors are basically affected by meanings of vehicles. However, when a vehicle itself has the neutral meaning, negative meanings are evoked more frequently for adjective metaphors among the other types of metaphors. Keywords: adjective metaphors; nominal metaphors; predicative metaphors; Japanese language; negative meanings. Introduction Metaphor studies in the domain of cognitive science have paid much attention to nominal metaphors such as “My job is a jail” (e.g., Bowdle & Gentner, 2005; Glucksberg, 2001) and predicative metaphors such as “He shot down all of my arguments” (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Martin, 1992). Previous metaphor studies, however, have paid little attention to adjective metaphors such as “sweet touch” and how they are comprehended. Some models have been proposed to explain the mechanism of metaphor comprehension in cognitive science. One theory that can explain the mechanism of metaphor comprehension would be the comparison theory proposed by Bowdle & Gentner (2005). This theory argues that metaphors are processed via a comparison process consisting of an initial alignment process between the source and the target concepts followed by a process of projection of aligned features into the target concept. On the other hand, Glucksberg and his colleagues (Glucksberg, 2001; Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990) propose categorization theory. This theory addresses mainly nominal metaphors and argues that people understand nominal metaphors by seeing the target concept as belonging to the superordinate metaphorical category exemplified by the source concept. These two theories target nominal metaphors and predicative metaphors. As for the mechanism of adjective metaphors, Utsumi & Sakamoto (2007) propose a two-stage categorization theory and argue that the comprehension process of adjective metaphors could be explained as a two-stage categorization process. The intuitive idea behind two-stage categorization is that correspondences between the properties literally expressed by the adjective and the properties to be mapped onto the noun would be indirect, mediated by an intermediate category, rather than direct as predicted by the categorization theory. Our study focuses on adjective metaphors and compares their semantic features with those of nominal and predicative metaphors. Many studies focusing on adjective metaphors; including Werning, Fleischhauer, & Beseoglu (2006), have examined how the acceptability of adjective metaphors can be explained by the pairing of adjective modifier’s and head noun’s modalities. Ullmann (1951), in a very early study on adjective metaphors, proposes a certain hierarchy of lower and higher perceptual modalities. He claims that qualities of lower senses should preferentially occur in the source domain, while qualities of higher senses should be preferred in target domain. His thesis of directionality thus asserts that a metaphor with a source domain lower in the hierarchy of sense modalities than the target domain should tend to be cognitively more accessible than a metaphor with the reverse direction of domains. After Ullmann, Williams (1976) makes a more differentiated claim of directionality, in which a similar order of sense modalities is proposed. Recently, Yu (2003) highlights cross-linguistic differences, when he makes different directionality claims for different languages (English as compared to Chinese). Werning, Fleischhauer, & Beseoglu (2006) explore the factors that enhance the cognitive accessibility of adjective metaphors for the German language. Very few studies, however, have attempted to explore meanings evoked by adjective metaphors. Sakamoto & Utsumi (2009) is one of the few studies which have explored meanings evoked by adjective metaphors. They compare the actual semantic changes