本文是一篇英语语言学论文，通过行为实验，本研究旨在探讨双语者在处理混合隐喻时使用的隐喻处理模型的一个小方面。本研究通过比较汉语（L1）-英语（L2）双语者对混合隐喻理解的两个相互冲突的假设，探讨了源域映射在汉英双语者对混合隐喻理解中的作用。
1 Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Metaphor is so pervasive in our daily life that it is always a hot spot of research. Thestudy of metaphor has been a long history since the time of Aristotle when metaphor wasconceived as a rhetorical device. Scholars both domestic and abroad have done a lot ofresearch on metaphor from various perspectives and have proposed different theories of it,especially in the field of linguistics. And it was since the publication of Metaphors We LiveBy by Lakoff and Johnson in the 1980s that there has been a cognitive turn in metaphorresearch[1]. Metaphor is now widely recognized as a fundamental scheme of thought, whichgets manifested at many levels of human experience, ranging from culture and history,through everyday thinking and language, to neural firings. Such a significant breakthroughhas brought a profound influence on metaphor study and motived scholars to explore thecognitive process behind all kinds of figurative languages.
As the metaphor research further develops, some special forms of metaphor aregradually drawing scholars’ attention too, including the mixed metaphor. In some cases, whena single metaphor is not enough to illustrate all the characteristics of an object or when thetheme needed to be reinforced, a mixed metaphor is probably to be applied. It is becoming anew hot topic in metaphor study. The fact that mixed metaphors are also pervasive has been aprominent acknowledgment[2-3] and has been proved[4-6]. However, one issue over whichscholars differ concerns how we comprehend mixed metaphors, and the issue of mixedmetaphors is largely an issue in metaphor processing.
Generally, we can think of metaphor comprehension in two ways: One is metaphoricalexpressions in discourse activate domains, or frames, representing source domains that arelinked to target domains, which is the more or less accepted view among those who embraceConceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT)[1]. The other one maintains that there is no activation ofsource domains in most cases. Instead, the metaphorical expressions used in discourse areassociated with a conventionalized metaphorical sense in the target domain, and it is thistarget meaning that gets activated in the course of processing metaphorical discourse[7]. Thetwo views have different implications for the study of mixed metaphors.
1.2 Research Purpose
Since scholars hold different ideas on how we comprehend mixed metaphors, andespecially there is a lack of comparative study on Chinese mixed metaphor and English mixedmetaphor comprehension by an experimental approach, the present study is about to explore asmall aspect of the fundamental question that how the mixed metaphors might be understoodand differentially presented in first and second language. To address this issue, we intend toconduct a categorization task to analyze the error rate and reaction time by recordingChinese-English speakers’ response to judge the literal truth of test sentences in their L1 andL2. Finally, this paper attempts to answer whether the comprehension of mixed metaphorsdepends on the construction of between-source-domain mappings and whether there existsdifferences between L1 and L2 mixed metaphor comprehension.
The traditional divide between “metaphor” and “mixed metaphor” may ultimately beuntenable given the various flexible ways that people employ metaphor in language andelsewhere[3]. Rather than being a deviation from proper metaphor use, mixed metaphors maybe ideal reflections of people’s typical metaphorical experiences in language, thought, andcommunication. In this manner, the study of mixed metaphor may offer significant insightsinto contrasting theories of metaphor.
2 Literature Review
2.1 An Introduction of Mixed Metaphor
In this part, we tried to build a general idea of “mixed metaphor” and then find out whatcharacteristics may make mixed metaphors diffe
