Cavanas, E. & Igoa, J. M.
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of abstract and concrete metaphor topics and vehicles in the interpretation of novel nominal metaphors of the form A is B. The study was designed with three major aims in mind: (1) to find out whether the abstract or concrete nature of the concepts is per se a critical variable in the interpretation of novel metaphors; (2) to test whether metaphors are generally understood by virtue of a single mechanism or procedure, be it structural alignment or categorization, as contemporary models of metaphor processing claim; and (3) to examine the effects of the symmetry between topic and vehicle of metaphors, in terms of their abstractness or concreteness, on the interpretation of metaphorical statements. We report the results of two offline questionnaire studies and one online cross-modal priming experiment designed to shed some light on these issues. The same set of materials was used in all three experiments: a list of 72 novel metaphors created by combining an abstract or concrete topic with an abstract or concrete vehicle, thereby yielding four experimental conditions. In the first questionnaire study, participants were asked to provide paraphrases of the metaphors, which were subsequently rated by two independent judges. In the second questionnaire study, participants independently rated the likelihood of two interpretations for each metaphor: a structural alignment, and a class-inclusion reading. Finally, in the cross-modal priming experiment, they performed a lexical decision task to words related to either of the two interpretations of each metaphor. The results suggest that concreteness does not play a crucial role in the interpretation of novel metaphors, and more importantly, that the prevalence of structural alignment or class-inclusion in the interpretation of metaphorical statements is sensitive to the symmetry of topic and vehicle in terms of abstractness or concreteness.