Dimensions of metaphor - Springer Link

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol. 12, No. l, 1983

Dimensions of Metaphor Marc Marschark t,3, Albert N. Katz, 2 and Allan Paivio 2 Accepted July 13, 1982 Two rating studies examined several dimensions of metaphorical sentences. A pool oj260 metaphors was constructed, all in the form "(noun phrase) is~are (noun phrase)." In Study 1 all of the items, and in Study 2, 98 of the items were evaluated on ten scales presumed to be important to the comprehension or interpretation of metaphors: semantic relatedness of the subject and predicate, comprehensibility, irnageability, imageability of the subject (topic), imageability of the predicate (vehicle), degree of metaphoricity, metaphor goodness, ease of interpretation, number of alternative interpretations, and felt familiarity of the metaphoric ground. Both experiments revealed the rated dimensions to be highly interrelated, but some analyses allowed evaluation of alternative predictions based on current theoretical approaches to metaphor quality and interpretation. The results indicated consistent but mixed support for the general poisitions under consideration as each appeared to have strong and weak areas of applicability. The interrelationships among the scales are discussed, together with implications of the findings for current theories and future metaphor research.

INTRODUCTION It is not necessary to search very far into the recent psychological literature to find a number of disparate models intended to account for the quality and comprehension of figurative language (see, for example, recent collections by Honeck & Hoffman, 1980; Ortony, 1979). These differ in their theoretical perspectives and most often, as a consequence,

l'2,3The research was supported by a University of North Carolina at Greensboro Research Council grant to Marc Marschark and grants A7040 to A. Katz and A0087 to A. Paivio, both of the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5C2, Canada, from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Address correspondence to Marc Marschark, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina 27412. 17

0090-6905[8310100-0017503.00/0 9 1983 Plenum Publishing Corporation

18

Marschark, Katz, and Paivio

in the attributes of metaphor that they offer as pre-eminent (see Anderson, 1964; Billow, 1977; Honeck & Hoffman, 1980, for reviews). The present study evaluated predictions from several of these approaches through two studies in which novel metaphors were rated on ten theoretically important dimensions. The dimensions chosen for study were dictated by several controversial questions in the metaphor literature. First, what are the characteristics of a sentence that lead to a nonliteral interpretation? Second, what are the characteristics that make some metaphors better or more aesthetically pleasing than other metaphors? Finally, given various theoretical suggestions that perceptual-like mechanisms play a special role in metaphoric processing, is there supportive evidence for these mechanisms and, if so, which of the theoretical positions are favored? These questions will be considered in terms of several current approaches to metaphor processing. It should be noted, however, that the predictions from most current models of figurative language are rather vague, and often, results that support one model can also support others. The present discussion, therefore, is intended to describe only the most obvious and general implications of the positions presented and only insofar as they can be applied to the simple "An A is a B" nominal-type metaphors involved in the following experiments. Tourangeau and Steinberg (Note 1) delineated three general views of metaphor: anomaly, comparison (or similarity), and interactionist. The emphasis in the anomaly view is on the dissimilarity of the semantic features of topics (subjects) and vehicles (predicates) (e.g., Campbell, 1975). This is dictated by the role played by selection restrictions in recent linguistic theory (e.g., Katz, 1972). Normally, selection restrictions are said to be violated when predicates do not fall into the exclusive category ranges determined by their subjects. The result is that such sentences are deemed anomalous or, at best, deviant. It is clear, however, that such violations are the essence of metaphor and that, by this criterion, sentences can be understood at a non-literal level. Ziff (1964) provided one solution to this problem. He suggested that comprehension in such cases is a matter of "grasping the simplest relation between the utterance and the set of non-deviant utterances" (p. 363, cf. Katz, 1964). This is accomplished through either the extension or contraction of word classes, that is, either loosening or tightening "a prior supposition that a certain word class is closed to a certain element" (p. 397). The more that the usual restriction rules must be adjusted, the more difficult should be the link of the deviant utterance to the non-deviant set. From the perspective of empirical research, this suggests that lower

Dimensions of Metaphor

19

semantic relatedness between a topic and vehicle should produce lower ratings of ease of interpretation, comprehensibility, and the number of alternative interpretations available for the sentence while increasing its degree of metaphoricity (at least up to some extreme point of true anomaly). The similarity or comparison view of figurative language is the traditional approach according to which a metaphor is seen as relating its subject, or tenor, to something else (in the predicate). Given a metaphor in the form " A n A is a B," therefore, its goodness, ease of interpretation, and degree of figurativeness (Johnson & Malgady, 1981; Malgady & Johnson, 1980) all are assumed to be directly related to the number and nature of attributes that " A " and " B " have in common (i.e., semantic relatedness) as well as the ease of their transfer (Johnson & Malgady, 1979). The interactionist view differs somewhat from both of the preceding positions insofar as it emphasizes both similarity and dissimilarity of the topic and vehicle as means to highlight analogous or parallel attributes rather than ones literally shared (e.g., Tourangeau & Sternberg, Note 1; 1981). This position therefore denies the simple positive or negative relationships between semantic relatedness and other metaphor attributes implicit in the previous approaches. Rather, it predicts curvilinear relationships between relatedness and measures of metaphor goodness, degree of metaphoricity, and ease of metaphorical interpretation. Thus, while anomaly doubtless arises if topic-vehicle dissimilarity (or tension) is stretched too far, there is considerable pre-anomaly room for metaphorical interpretation. 4 Johnson (1968, cited in Johnson, 1975), for example, demonstrated that subjects can produce valid, if "metaphorical" responses to analogies composed of randomly paired terms (see also, Pollio & Burns, 1977; Pollio & Smith, Note 2). Such findings present serious problems for both the similarity and anomaly perspectives which can't both have their cake and eat it. Orthogonal to the above views of metaphor are several others reflecting a variety of more specific theoretical perspectives. Various of these emphasize the importance of perception-like (Johnson & Malgady, 1980; Verbrugge, 1977) or imaginal processes (Langer, 1948; Paivio, 1971, Ch. 13), verbal processes (Koen, 1965), both (Paivio, 1979), or neither (Honeck, Riechmann, & Hoffman, 1975; Skinner, 1957). Malgady and 4Curvilinear relationships, if obtained would not necessarily be incompatible with the similarity position. Malgady and Johnson (1980) in fact argue that such a relationship could occur " a t least in part because of the similarity created between two ordinarily dissimilar ideas." (p. 242, italics added). This claim, however, does not appear to be a direct consequence of their still relatively vague model and requires processing assumptions that they have yet to detail.

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Johnson (1976; Johnson & Malgady, 1981), for example, proposed that perceptual mechanisms analogous to those postulated for Gestalt principles (cf. Asch, 1958) underlie metaphoric processing. One implication of this is that since a good metaphor is one that lends itself to a single interpretation or Gestalt (Malgady & Johnson, 1976, p. 51), metaphor goodness should be inversely related to the number of alternative interpretations available. The attention given imagery in recent language research also suggests its importance to psychological studies of metaphor. For the present, primary interest lay in the relationship of imagery to several interpretability measures. In addition to overall metaphor imagery, subject and predicate imageability were evaluated separately in this study. These scales were included on the basis of a suggestion made by Paivio (1979) that vehicle imagery should be more important than topic imagery in the interpretation of metaphors. His proposal was based on the assumption that, "the vehicle serves as an efficient conceptual peg for metaphor comprehension to the extent that it promotes retrieval of images and verbal information that intersects with information aroused by the topic" (cf. Verbrugge & McCarrell, 1977, p. 168). This suggests that the importance of vehicle imagery for interpretability may vary with the semantic relatedness of the corresponding topic. One further language variable of interest here was felt familiarity. All of the metaphors in the present study were novel to the extent that they were either created by the authors or drawn from recent research in the area presumed to be unknown to our introductory psychology subjects. Nonetheless, the idea expressed by any particular metaphor, even if novel, may be relatively familiar since some uses of metaphor are more common than others. Metaphors likening love or a loved one to flowers or heavenly bodies ("Juliet is the sun"), for example, are more common than those likening history to a magnet or a mountain range to headstones. While this variable has yet to be empirically studied with specific regard to metaphors, the importance of the familiarity variable in the verbal learning tradion argued for its inclusion here. In summary, the purpose of the present study was to determine and evaluate possible relationships among several variables currently deemed important in metaphor research. Since that research involves a variety of theoretical orientations and empirical traditions, several alternative predictions were possible. These were not all definitive nor mutually exclusive but did provide bases for evaluating several current models of metaphor processing despite the vagueness of their current formulations. The expectations from the anomaly perspective were that greater topic-vehicle relatedness should increase a metaphor's ease of interpretation, compre-


21

hensibility, and the number of alternative interpretations of it, but decrease its degree of metaphoricity. The similarity perspective, in contrast, led to the prediction that greater semantic relatedness should increase a metaphor's figurativeness as well as its goodness and ease of interpretation. Malgady and Johnson's (1976, 1980; Johnson & Malgady, 1981) perceptual theory of metaphor comprehension similarly predicted that semantic relatedness should be directly related to ease of metaphoric interpretation and metaphor goodness. Goodness, however, should be inversely related to the number of alternative interpretations available for a metaphor according to that position. From an interactionist perspective, relationships between the semantic relatedness of a metaphor's topic and vehicle and its goodness, degree of metaphoricity, and ease of metaphoric interpretation should be curvilinear (inverted U-shaped). Finally, according to Paivio's (1979) imagery position, the imageability of a metaphor's predicate (or vehicle) should be relatively more important than that of its subject (or topic) for ease of metaphoric interpretation. GENERAL METHOD

Metaphor pool. A set of 260 metaphors was constructed. These were mostly novel metaphors created by the authors, although items from several recent figurative-language research papers were also included. All items were in the form "(noun phrase) is~are (noun phrase)." This provided consistency with the majority of current empirical work in the area and avoided possible problems associated with differences between metaphors and other figures of speech such as proverbs. Rating scales. The ten variables assessed in this study were the extent to which the metaphors described a situation in an apt and pleasing way (metaphor goodness); the ease or difficulty with which the sentence aroused mental imagery (imageability); the ease or difficulty of image arousal to either sentence subjects or predicates (subject imagery, predicate imagery); the relatedness of subjects and predicates (semantic relatedness); extent of figurative versus literal interpretation (degree of metaphoricity); familiarity of the ideas expressed in the sentences (felt familiarity); comprehensibility; ease of metaphoric interpretation; and the number of alternative interpretations that could be given. 5 5 For the purposes of this study, subjects were not required to provide interpretations of the items. In a subsequent study involving a subset of these items (Marschark, Hunt, & Penland, Note 3), however, subjects did so. The number of different interpretations supplied by individual subjects spanned the same range as a control group doing the rating task, and that of the present normative data. The correlation between the normative rated number of interpretations and those actually produced was r(32) = .58, p < .001.

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All instructions were modelled after and comparable to instructions used in previous, similar tasks. Items were referred to as "metaphors" only where necessary, and otherwise, simply as "'sentences." All instructions were accompanied by a labelled depiction of the rating scale and three practice sentences. The practice sentences were the same for all subjects. Except for number of different alternatives, the variables were rated on 7-point scales. Each instructional set consisted of a definition of the construct to be measured, some concrete examples, and detailed information on how to fill out the rating scale. A complete example of one instructional set is given in the Appendix. The remainder, as well as the full metaphor pool and the normative ratings are available from the authors. STUDY 1

Procedure and subjects. Each subject received a test booklet containing one of 10 instruction sheets and 319 to-be-rated sentences. These consisted of the 260 metaphors plus 59 item repetitions intended for use in reliability checks. Twenty-nine of the latter were randomly distributed throughout the booklet: the other 30 were first presented in a block halfway through the list and were repeated at the end of the booklet. Each of the ten variable scales was rated by a different group of approximately 33 subjects (range 32 to 35). All 334 subjects were University of Western Ontario undergraduates, participating to satisfy part of a course requirement. Test materials were randomly assigned in all testing sessions. Subjects read the instruction sheet and were self-paced in their ratings of the items. They were told to rate each item on its own, even if they had encountered it before (as a reliability item). RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Reliability of Measttres Reliabilities of each of the 10 variables was assessed both within and between subjects. Within-subject reliability measures were obtained by calculating Pearson correlations between the first and second occurrence of each of the 59 reliability items. These correlations were generally quite high; at least 75% of the coefficients for each variable were significant at or beyond the .001 level. The median coefficients and the number of reliable correlations (out of 59) are shown in Table I. There were no particular items that were consistently unreliable. Between-subject reliability was assessed by computing Cronbach alpha coefficients for the


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Table I. Median Within-Subject Reliability Correlations (59 Possible); Cronbach Alpha Coefficients for 10 Rating Scales (Study 1) mm

Median Rating scale

ra

Degree of metaphoricity Metaphor goodness Felt familiarity No. of alternatives Ease of interpretation Comprehensibility Semantic relatedness Subject imagery Predicate imagery Overall imagery

.67 .72 .79 .81 .80 .72 .71 .66 .82 .76

No. significant reliability correlations 56 58 59 58 58 57 58 57 57 58

Alpha coefficient .986 .982 .989 .996 .990 .989 .987 .969 .986 .983

aAll p's < .00l. ratings o f each of the ten variables. All of the coefficients obtained were greater than .95 (see Table I) indicating surprisingly high reliability across o u r normative sample. M e a n ratings (and standard deviations) were calculated for each of the 260 metaphors in the pool. In order to eliminate any artifactual familiarity effects, only the first rating of each of the repeated items was included in subsequent analyses. Nevertheless, repetition effects were e x a m i n e d by performing t-tests between the ratings for first and second o c c u r r e n c e o f each of the 29 randomly distributed reliability items. Out of the 290 tests (29 for each of ten scales), only 31 (11%) yielded significant differences at or beyond the .05 level. These were fairly evenly distributed across all ten variables. Thirteen of the significant effects reflected higher ratings for first occurrences and 18 reflected higher ratings for second occurrences of the reliability items. This difference was not significant by a sign test. Similar tests for the 30 blocked repetitions could not be obtained because, contrary to instructions, approximately 25% of the subjects failed to rate the second set of these items. R e l a t i o n s h i p s A m o n g the Ten M e a s u r e s

As a first step in trying to describe the ratings, simple Pearson p r o d u c t - m o m e n t correlations were computed among the ten scales. The results o f those analyses, shown in Table II, indicated the measures all to be highly interrelated. The correlation coefficients ranged from a low of r = .36 to a high of r = .93, with most falling in the .50 to .80 range. A

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Table II. Intercorrelations Among the Ten Metaphor Scales (Study 1)"'/~ i

i

1

l. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Imageability (/) Subject I Predicate I Ease of interpretation Degree of metraphoricity 6. Felt familiarity 7. Semantic relatedness 8. Metaphor goodness 9. Number of alternatives 10. Comprehensibility

i

i

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

.90 -

.90 .86 -

.90 .86 .87 -

.61 .62 .54 ,65

.80 .79 .72 .80

.86 ,85 .81 .87

.79 .78 .76 .82

.67 .62 .61 .65

.91 .90 .85 .93

-

.63 -

.74 .82 -

.65 ,78 ,88 -

.36 .69 .60 .58 -

,67 .82 .88 .82 .65

adJ = 258. bAll p's < .01. principle c o m p o n e n t factor analysis performed on these data, not surprisingly, indicated the presence of only one factor with an eigenvalue greater than unity, accounting for a remarkable 78.8% of the observed c o m m o n variance. It appears, at least for the ten measures described here, that either much of a m e t a p h o r ' s meaning and impact can be traced to a c o m m o n , underlying source, or that the difficulty of processing a m e t a p h o r i c sentence requires consideration of virtually all of the dimensions evaluated here. Although there is no direct evidence as to w h e t h e r the same would obtain with literal, nonmetaphoric sentences, there is literature which suggests otherwise (e.g., O'Neill & Paivio, 1978).

Multiple Correlations In order to clarify the relationships among the dimensions of interest, ten multiple regression analyses were performed, one for each measure. In e v e r y case, one of the measures was treated as a criterion variable while the other variables were entered as predictors. A stepwise procedure was e m p l o y e d such that the predictors maintained in the final regression e q u a t i o n were those, and only those, which added significant predictability (~ = .05) even when the influence of all the other variables was partialled out. The ten regression equations are outlined in Table III. Reading across the Table are the criterion variable, the multiple R obtained, the constant (X) added to the equation which maximized prediction o f the criterial raw score, and the predictor variables which had a reliable and statistically independent relationship with the criterion.


25

e~

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t_

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I

o

t~

9

Z

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26


Thus, reading across the first row, one can predict the raw score obtained on the degree of metaphoricity ratings by the formula, R = .74 (semantic relatedness score) + .33 (comprehensibility) - .26 (predicate imagery) - . 14 (no. of alternatives) + 1.41; the multiple R = .76. These results indicated that sentences were more likely to be considered metaphorical if they were of low semantic relatedness, difficult to comprehend, had a predicate (i.e., vehicle) that was easy to image, and was a sentence with many alternative interpretations. The other nine regression equations can be interpreted in a similar fashion.

Theoretical Considerations First, the interrelationships among the present measures suggest a need for better controls in metaphor research. To date, the majority of relevant studies have varied one or two of the indices described here while neglecting other relevant variables. The correlations shown in Table II, while somewhat high, lie for the most part in the same range as that observed for item attributes such as word meaningfulness and concreteness, which have been shown to be theoretically and empirically separable (cf. Paivio, 1971). Thus, it should be feasible to perform metaphor experiments in which the effects of each variable can be independently assessed. Despite the high correlations among the ten rating scales, some of the multiple regression results permitted evaluation of the theoretical predictions outlined above. Consistent with both the similarity and anomaly approaches to metaphor, the semantic relatedness of topics and vehicles was found to be a reliable positive predictor of ease of interpretation. The similarity prediction of a positive relationship between relatedness and meatphor goodness was also supported (see Table III). Contrary to that position, however, degree of metaphoricity was inversely related to topic-vehicle relatedness. This finding is consistent with the anomaly position. The further anomaly predictions, that relatedness should be positively related to comprehensibility and number of alternative interpretations, were not supported by the multiple regression analyses (see Table III). The interactionist position led to predictions of curvilinear relationships between semantic relatedness and degree of metaphoricity, metaphor goodness, and ease of metaphoric interpretation. These were evaluated through examination of scatterplots of the variables involved and polynomial regressions. Ease of interpretation appeared to have a slightly curvilinear relationship with semantic relatedness. Although the curve did not reach an inflection point, it had a reliable quadratic


27

component, F(1,257) = 6.00. The addition of the quadratic component to the regression equation, however, accounted for only about .2% of the variance. Degree of metaphoricity and metaphor goodness were the two best linear predictors according to the multiple regression, and neither had a reliable quadratic component, both F's (1,257) < 1.50. The linear relationship obtained between semantic relatedness and metaphor goodness replicated that obtained by Johnson and Malgady (1979) and was consistent with the prediction from their perceptual model of metaphor interpretation. That model also entails, however, that a good metaphor is one that has only a single interpretation; an inverse relationship therefore would be predicted between a metaphor's goodness and the number of alternative interpretation available for it. This prediction was contradicted by the relatively high, positive correlation obtained (r = .58). Further, the best-fitting regression line had a slope of 1.30 and an x-intercept (alternatives) of 1.45. Contrary to the Johnson and Malgady position, the " b e s t " metaphors were those with about two interpretations. The mean rated goodness at one interpretation was about 2.7, whereas at two interpretations it was about 4.6 on our seven-point scale. The data also allowed evaluation of Paivio's (1979) prediction that predicate imageability should be relatively more important for a metaphor's interpretation than the imageability of its subject. Although there was little difference between the simple correlations of ease of interpretation with subject and predicate imageability (r's = .86 and .87, respectively), partialling out the effects of all other variables in the multiple correlations left predicate imagery as the only reliable imageability predictor. In addition to the specific predictions tested above, two somewhat more speculative findings deserve comment. First there is an apparent paradox in the data when one compares the regression equations (Table III) obtained for degree of metaphoricity and metaphor goodness. High semantic relatedness was related to metaphor goodness here, while low relatedness was related to the judgment of a sentence as metaphoric. It is as if people used the degree of semantic relatedness to help them to decide whether a sentence was literal or not, with low relatedness implying metaphoricity. Once the sentence was perceived as being metaphoric, however, semantic relatedness was employed or viewed differently, with high relatedness then implying a good metaphor. It also should be noted that semantic relatedness was the greatest contributor to both criterion variables, and the different roles it plays obviously demand further investigation. The second finding involves the comparison of comprehensibility and interpretability ratings. The high simple relationship (r = .93) indicates that people do similar things when asked to interpret

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" m e t a p h o r s " and comprehend "sentences." Nonetheless the subtle differences which do emerge suggest that the imposition of a metaphor orientation leads to an emphasis on some different aspects in the rating task than does a sentence orientation. Comparing the predicators of comprehensibility and interpretability, a sentence orientation led participants to focus on the literalness, concreteness, and familiarity of the sentence; whereas a metaphor orientation led to a focus on the relationship of the subject and predicate, and predicate concreteness. Obviously the effects of simple instructional differences on how one processes linguistic input also deserve further investigation. STUDY 2 The results of Study 1 indicated high consistency both within and between subjects in the metaphor rating task. They also provided the basis for evaluating several theoretical positions currently of interest in empirical metaphor research, yielding mixed support for all three of the general approaches considered. Perhaps most importantly, however, the use of ten different rating scales provided information concerning the interrelationships among variables typically confounded in investigations of metaphor attributes and interpretation. If the high correlations obtained among those variables seem to present interpretation difficulties for a rating study, their importance for manipulative research cannot be overestimated. Given the potential implications of these findings and the mixed support for the similarity, anomaly, and interactionist positions, a replication study was conducted. Study 2 involved subjects from a different source than those in Study 1 and a subset of the original stimulus pool. There were two restrictions on the quasi-random selection of stimulus items. First, any metaphors that involved auditory reference (e.g., "Silence is an apron") were eliminated to facilitate further use of the materials with deaf subjects. Second, stimuli for this experiment were chosen from among those with lower between-subject variability. This constraint was an attempt to eliminate potential, artifactual item variance that may have been created by the non-systematic manner of metaphor construction. No attempts were made, however, to control the distributions of items within or across the ten scales. The result was a pool of 98 metaphors that appeared to be a representative subset of the original pool.


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Table IV. Mean Scale Ratings (and Standard Deviations) for 260-Item Stimulus Pool and the 98-Item Subset of Study 2, as Obtained in Study 1, and New Mean Ratings Obtained for 98-|terns in Study 2 m

Study 1 260 Items 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Degree of metaphoricity Metaphor goodness Semantic relatedness Number of alternatives Subject 1 Predicate I Imageability (/) Felt familiarity Ease of interpretation Comprehensibility

3.13 3.88 3.82 1.87 4.04 4.08 4.02 3.52 5.13 5.13

(.61) (.81) (1.01) (.36) (.93) (.94) (1.05) (1.08) (.94) (.92)

Study 2 98 Items

98 Items

3.25 (.66) 4.13 (.94) 4.15 (1.17) 1.94 (.40) 4.35 (1.03) 4.28 (1.06) 4.26 (t.23) 3.78 (l.16) 5.33 (1.08) 5.35 (1.03)

3.41 (.79) 4.30 (1.04) 3.94 (1.28) 1.81 (.26) 4.66 (1.24) 4.47 (1.03) 4.56 (1.25) 3.94 (1.20) 5.08 (1.28) 4.97 (1.04) m

Method Stimuli and procedure. Mean scale ratings for the 98-item subset used in Study 2 were calculated from the data of Study 1. These are p r e s e n t e d in Table IV where it can be seen that both the means and standard deviations for all of the scales were somewhat higher than those o f the complete 260-item pool. The differences in the means were all relatively small (between .07 and .35), however, and appeared unlikely to affect the results. The p r o c e d u r e was identical to that of Study 1. The 98 metaphors were randomly ordered on four pages of a test booklet and page order was r a n d o m across both subjects and rating scales. Each booklet contained a single instruction page; instructions were identical to those used in S t u d y 1. Subjects. The subjects were all undergraduate students at the Univeristy of N o r t h Carolina at Greensboro, participating to satisfy part of a c o u r s e requirement. Ratings on each of the ten scales were obtained from a different group of approximately 30 subjects. A total of 303 subjects w e r e tested in groups of 3 to 34.

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RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Reliability of Measures Reliabilities of ratings for the ten variables were assessed between subjects by Cronbach alpha coefficients for each. All of the coefficients obtained were greater than .87; all but one were greater than .90 (see Table V). Mean ratings (and standard deviations) were calculated for each of the 98 metaphors, and consistency with the ratings of Study 1 was assessed by computing Pearson correlation coefficients between the two sets of means. These were all highly reliable (see Table V).

Relationships Among the Ten Rating Scales The simple correlations among the 10 measures are shown in Table VI. These ranged from .01 to .94; all but three of the correlations were reliable at the .01 level. The only large deviations from Study 1 were lower correlations between the rated number of alternative interpretations for the metaphors and the other scales (mean r's = .62 and .24 for Studies 1 and 2, respectively). The reasons for this are not immediately apparent, but it was probably just as likely due to differences between the samples of subjects involved as the samples of stimuli. Although the effects of this aberration on the results are difficult to determine, the outcome of the multiple regression analyses (where the predictors were isolated) suggested that the simple correlations probably underestimated the comparability of the two studies. A principle component factor analysis performed on the data from Study 2 indicated two factors with eigenvalues greater than unity. The first factor (eigenvalue 7.71) contained all of the scales; number of alternative interpretations had a factor loading of .297, and all others had loadings greater than .745. This factor accounted for 77.1% of the variance, comparable to the 78.8% accounted for by the single factor obtained in Study 1. The only variables to load on the second factor (eigenvalue 1.06) were number of interpretations (factor loading .928) and degree of metaphoricity (-.350), the two variables with the lowest factor loadings in Study 1. This factor accounted for 10.6% of the variance and further evidence the fact that ratings of the number of alternative interpretations available for the metaphors provided the only real difference between the two studies. Given the apparent comparability of the stimuli in the two studies (see Table IV), however, this finding seems likely to have arisen as a consequence of differences between the


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Table V. Reliability Measures, Study 2: Cronbach Alpha Coefficients for 10 Rating Scales and Pearson Correlation Coefficients for Ratings Obtained in Studies 1 and 2 (98-Item Subset) n

Alpha coefficient

Pearson correlation coefficient between Studies 1 and 2a

.878 .911 .959 .968 .929 .942 ~923 .977 .952 .924

,84 .86 .92 .57 .83 .86 .89 .91 .90 .91

Degree of metaphoricity Metaphor goodness Semantic relatedness No. of alternative interpretations Subject (topic) imagery Predicate (vehicle) imagery Overall imagery Felt familiarity Ease of interpretation Comprehensibility

adf

=

96, all p's < .001. Table VI. Intercorrelations Among the Ten Metaphor Scales (Study 2)~`'t~

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Imagability(/) Subject I Predicatel Easeofinterpretation Degreeofmetaphoricity Felt familiarity Semantic relatedness Metaphor goodness Number of alternatives Comprehensibility

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

-

.89 -

.93 .84 -

.94 .84 .91 -

.67 .52 .61 .71 -

.88 .75 .89 .90 .69 -

.91 .78 ,86 .93 .82 .87 -

.85 .68 .86 .89 .62 .83 .86 -

.24 .17" .32 .25 .01"* .41 .15" .34 -

.93 .82 .89 .95 .69 .91 .91 .87 .23

adf =

96. bAllp's -< ,01 except: *p < .07 (2); **N.S. (1). C a n a d i a n s t u d e n t s o f S t u d y 1 a n d the A m e r i c a n (mostly s o u t h e r n ) s t u d e n t s o f S t u d y 2. It is u n c l e a r , h o w e v e r , w h y such differences w o u l d h a v e a f f e c t e d o n l y o n e o f the rating scales.

Multiple Correlations T h e s a m e s t e p w i s e p r o c e d u r e a n d criteria e m p l o y e d in S t u d y 1 were u s e d h e r e . T h e t e n r e g r e s s i o n e q u a t i o n s that r e s u l t e d are p r e s e n t e d in

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Table VI. Those variables that were also significant predicators in the first study are underlined to indicate their interpretative importance. Despite restrictions in selecting 98 items for the second experiment from the original 260, the overlap between the two studies was impressive. Fully 27 of the 39 significant predicators found in the multiple regressions of Study 1 also emerged in Study 2. A 2 x 2 chi-square analysis (lst study predictor/no predictor vs 2nd study predictor/no predictor), in which the frequency data were the number of correlations that fell into each of the 4 cells, confirmed the dependence of the two studies X2 = 6.52, p < .025. Moreover of the 12 failures, i.e., predictors found in Study 1 but not significant in Study 2, 6 were marginally significant.

Theoretical Considerations

As in Study 1, some of the present results were pertinent to alternative theoretical positions concerning metaphor quality and interpretation. The findings regarding the similarity position replicated those of the previous experiment, as the same two (of three) predictions were supported. Semantic relatedness of topic and vehicle was a positive, reliable predictor of metaphor goodness and ease of interpretation, but not degree of metaphoricity. Two of the four predictors from the anomaly position were also supported, as they had been in Study 1. Semantic relatedness was a reliable, positive predictor of ease of interpretation, and a negative predictor of degree of metaphoricity. Predictions concerning comprehensibility and number of alternatives, as in Study 1, were not supported. The interactionist predictions of curvilinear relationships between semantic relatedness and measures of goodness, degree of metaphoricity, and ease of interpretation were evaluated again using scatter plots and polynomial regressions. The findings were almost exactly the same as those obtained before. Ease of interpretation had a very slight curvilinear component in its relationship with semantic relatedness. Although the contribution of the quadratic term to the regression equation was significant, F(1, 95) = 6.74 it accounted for only .4% additional variance beyond the 94% contributed by the linear components. The findings with regard to Johnson and Malgady's (1981) perceptual theory of metaphor replicated those of Study 1: metaphor goodness was directly related to semantic relatedness, but not inversely related to the number of alternative interpretations as had been predicted. The "best"


33

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Iii

34


metaphors appeared to be those with an average of about 1.8 interpretations. Finally, Paivio's (1979) prediction of a greater role for predicate imagery than subject imagery in metaphor interpretation was supported by the simple correlations, r's = .91 and .84, respectively. This difference was relatively small, however, and predicate imagery was no longer a reliable predictor of interpretability in the multiple correlation analysis. It may be that the exclusion of metaphors with auditory imagery from this experiment created a bias in the stimulus pool. Finally, the two supplementary results obtained earlier emerged in this second study. First, high semantic relatedness was related to judgments of metaphor goodness whereas low relatedness was related to judgment of a sentence as metaphorical. Second, it again appeared that a metaphor orientation (relevant for the ease of interpretation) led to a focus on the relationship between subject and topic whereas the sentential orientation of this measure (relevant for comprehensibility) led to a focus on the concreteness and familiarity of the sentence. GENERAL DISCUSSION Three general questions, outlined in the introduction, guided this research. The first two concerned the characteristics which lead to a sentence being interpreted as a metaphor, and those which underlie metaphoric goodness. With respect to the first question, it appears that sentences are more likely to be seen as metaphoric as their subjects and predicates become less similar in meaning. At the same time the sentence must be such that it suggests alternative interpretations. A metaphor is thus a sentene that does not readily lead to interpretation yet nonetheless " p r o m i s e s " that one might be available. The comparison between the ease of interpretation and the comprehensibility ratings also suggested that orienting people to interpret sentences as metaphors engenders a strategy in which subject-predicate relationships are sought, and perhaps predicate imagery elicited. Within this "metaphor mode," those sentences that are easier to interpret and in which the subject (topic) and predicate (vehicle) are more closely related are seen as more apt and pleasing (i.e., better) metaphors. These findings have relevance for the different classes of models postulated for metaphor processing. Consider first the role assumed to be played by semantic relatedness. According to many linguistic models (e.g., J. J. Katz, 1972) metaphors are linguistically anomalous and hence, should be difficult to interpret at best (but see Glucksberg, Gildea, & Bookin, 1982). Since acceptable sentences are assumed to depend upon a


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correspondence between subject and object selection restrictions, that correspondence should be related to indices relevant to the interpretability of the sentence. This suggests that semantic relatedness should be positively related to measures of sentential interpretability but negatively related to measures of figurativeness. The multiple regression data, however, provided little support for this position. Semantic relatedness was positively related to ease of interpretation only in Study 2, and contrary to predictions was not a reliable predictor of comprehensibility (although the linear, positive correlation between them was around .90), nor of the number of alternative interpretations of a metaphor. Further, the relationship between semantic relatedness and degree of metaphoricity was strongly positive in both studies. The latter finding was consistent with comparison (or similarity) models of metaphor interpretation. Johnson and Malgady's (1979) model may be considered prototypical of these approaches in the assumption that "the meaning of a word can be thought of as a set or vector of potential underlying elements" (p. 251). According to this approach, linguistic context establishes some set of features as the effective meaning of the word in a particular instance. The combination of words in a metaphor (or any other sentence, for that matter) then, results in summation of the feature sets or vectors of the component parts. The "meaning" and presumably the interpretation of the metaphor, in turn, consists in those features shared by the topic and vehicle and thus made salient by the combination. Consistent with this formulation, Johnson and Malgady found both metaphor goodness and ease of interpretation to be positively related to measures of topic and vehicle (noun) relatedness in 28 literary metaphors. The present data, based on intuitively constructed metaphors, also revealed this pattern. (Comprehensibility, and not ease of interpretation, was a significant predictor in Study 1, but this was reversed in Study 2). This finding stands in contrast to the position taken by Campbell (1975), who argued that it is the dissimilarity of topic and vehicle that makes metaphors distinctive. According to that position, less topic and vehicle overlap should lead to higher ratings of metaphor goodness. In summary, the present data indicate that high semantic relatedness is positively associated with the perception of a sentence as being easy to image, understandable, and a good metaphor, at least for sentences constructed with metaphoric relationships in mind. It may be, however, that the relationship between semantic relatedness and metaphoric properties like figurativeness, are curvilinear rather than linear when considered across the complete range of possible sentences (Johnson &

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Malgady, 1980). If semantic relatedness is too high, as in "A canary is a bird," a sentence may be perceived as being nonfigurative; if too low, as in " A turtle is a dance," a sentence may be considered anomalous. Metaphors appear to fall somewhere in between these extremes. Tourangeau and Sternberg (Note 1) made a somewhat similar suggestion in assuming metaphor goodness to be determined by distances between subject and predicate concepts both between and within semantic domains. Unfortunately, the present stimulus set was too restricted to allow evaluation of this possibility insofar as both anomalous and literal sentences were avoided (cf. Johnson & Malgady, 1979). The final question guiding this research concerned the role of perceptual-like processes in metaphor processing. Two general models were discerned. One was Malgady and Johnson's (1976)hypothesis that perceptual mechanisms, similar to those proposed by Asch (1958) for Gestalt principles, underlie the processing of metaphors. The second involved the role of imaginal processes. Malgady and Johnson's perceptual position entails metaphor goodness being closely related to the semantic relatedness of topics and vehicles, and this was clearly the case in both of these experiments. At the same time, however, the Gestalt position suggests that goodness would also be a function of the ease with which a metaphor can be assigned a single, wholistic interpretation (Malgady & Johnson, 1976). The present data did not support this prediction, as increasing numbers of interpretations led to better metaphor ratings. The best metaphors appeared to be those with an average of almost two interpretations (cf. Marschark et al., Note 3). Another implication of the Malgady and Johnson position is that figurativeness should be a function of the number of alternative interpretations possible for the metaphor. As would be predicted, greater figurativeness was positively related to the number of perceived alternative interpretations in both of the present experiments. Greater figurativeness also was related, however, to the imageability of metaphoric vehicles, and the beta weights associated with the imagery variable suggested that it was the more important correlate of the two. While metaphoric imagery might also implicate perceptual-like processing, it does not refer necessarily to the same mechanism as entailed by "perceptual richness." Empirical work on disentangling the two contributors is clearly needed. The role of imagery in metaphor processing is also an important issue in its own right. The importance of imaginal processes in metaphor comprehension has been considered by a number of authors (e.g.,


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Langer, 1948; Miller, 1979; Paivio, 1971, Ch. 13, 1979; Verbrugge, 1977). Paivio (1979) discussed the contributions of both imagery and verbal processes (as separate but interconnected systems) in metaphor comprehension. He emphasized the organizational characteristics of the imagery system in providing a large storehouse of potentially relevant, detail-rich information. At the same time, verbal information increases the probability of finding a connection between the topic and vehicle of the metaphor and keeps the search process "on track." Paivio further suggested that the vehicle is the more potent term of a metaphor insofar as it is its properties, by definition, that are transferred to the topic. He therefore concluded that imagery of the vehicle should be crucial to imaginal interpretation of a metaphor because a concrete term provides for more rapid access to the information-rich images. The data obtained in Study 1 supported Paivio's analysis inasmuch as sentences rated high in metaphoricity and comprehensibility tended to have predicates (vehicles) that were easy to image (see Table II). In Study 2, the simple correlational data supported this view, although the multiple correlation data on the restricted stimulus subset did not. These relationships are consistent with imagery playing some role in metaphor comprehension and at the least contradict the claim of Reichmann and Coste (1980) that it is a "tangential phenomenon." While imaginal processes are doubtless important in the comprehension of those metaphors that involve comparisons of perceptual attributes, we would not wish to argue that visual imagery is necessary for the interpretation of all metaphors. In particular, while research in related areas has indicated imagery to aid in the processing of some abstract attributes, like the pleasantness of an object (Paivio & Marschark, 1980), whether or not it is important for the comprehension of abstract metaphors remains an empirical question (cf. Marschark & Paivio, 1977). Further, the effects of imagery in sense modalities other than vision have not really been addressed. The elimination of auditory-related metaphors in the second experiment, however, appears to have had some effect on the resulting pool, suggesting the need for further investigations in this regard. Several additional points should be mentioned in conclusion. First, while extensive by curreht standards in the area in terms of the number of metaphors employed and participants tested, the present data are based only on intuitively-generated metaphors. The relationships observed among the ten measures employed in the present study may not be the same as those found to be relevant to metaphors generated in other ways (e.g., Johnson, 1975; Reyna, Note 4). The similarity of the relationships

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observed here with the literary and randomly-generated metaphors employed by Johnson and Malgady (1980) is impressive, however, and augurs well with the generality of the present findings. Second, the present results derived from metaphors of only one form and may not generalize to other figurative language, such as proverbs, despite the claim by some (Honeck & Hoffman, 1980) that these are amenable to the same empirical and theoretical analysis. Finally, the high interrelations of the present indicies and the resultant emergence of a single statistical factor accounting for almost 80% of the variance, should again be emphasized. While we hesitate to label this "monster" factor (in the sense of Frankenstein's monster being composed of many different parts but not easily named on the basis of any subset of them), similar results have been obtained by other investigators (e.g., Johnson & Malgady, 1979) and appear to be the nature of the beast. Rather than viewing this with alarm, researchers should search for the reasons underlying the commonality and ensure that the stimuli used in future metaphor studies are carefully chosen. REFERENCE NOTES 1. Tourangeau, R., & Sternberg, R. J. Understanding and appreciating metaphors. Unpulished mimeo (Technical Report No. 11), June 1978. 2. Pollio, H., & Smith, M. Sense and nonsense in thinking about anomaly and metaphor. Unpublished mimeo, 1978. 3. Marschark, M., Hunt, R., & Penland, M. On memory for metaphor. Manuscript in preparation, 1982. 4. Reyna, V. F. Metaphor comprehension and word menaing. Paper presented at the Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting, Phoenix, Arizona, 1979.

REFERENCES Anderson, C. C. The psychology of the metaphor. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1964, 105, 53-73. Asch, S. E. The metaphor: A psychological inquiry. In R. Tagiuri & L. PetrnUo (Eds.), Person perception and interpersonal behavior. Standford, California: Stanford University Press, 1958. Billow, R. Metaphor: A review of the psychological literature. Psychological Bulltin, 1977, 84, 81-92. Campbell, P. Metaphor and linguistic theory. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1975, 61, 1-12. Glucksberg, S., Gildea, P., & Bookin, H. G. On understanding nonliteral speech: Can people ignore metaphors? Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1982, 21, 85-98.


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Honeck, R., & Hoffman, R. (Eds.), Cognition and figurative language. Hitlsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 1980. Honeck, R., Reichmann, P., & Hoffrnan, R. Semantic memory for metaphor: The conceptual base hypothesis. Memory and Cognition, 1975, 3, 409-415. Johnson, M. Some psychological implications of language flexibility. Behaviorism, 1975, 3, 87-95. Johnson, M., & Malgady, R. Some cognitive aspects of figurative language: Association and metaphor. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1979, 8, 253-265. Johnson, M. E., & Malgady, R. Toward a perceptual theory of metaphoric comprehension. In R. Honeck & R. Hoffman (Eds.), Cognition and figurative language. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 1980. Katz, J. J. Semi-sentences. In J. Fodor & J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Katz, J. J. Semantic thory. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Koen, F. An intra-verbal explication of the nature of metaphor. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1965, 4, 129-133. Langer, S. Philosophy in a new key. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (Reprinted by Mentor Brooks, New York, 1948). Malgady, R. G., & Johnson, M. G. Modifiers in metaphors: Effects of constituent phrase similarity on interpretation of figurative sentences. Journal of Psyehofnguistic Research, 1976, 5, 43-52. Malgady, R., & Johnson, M. Measurement of figurative language: Semantic feature models of comprehension and appreciation. In R. Honeck & R. Hoffman (Eds.), Cognition and figurative language. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 1980. Marschark, M., & Paivio, A. Integrative processing of concrete and abstract sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1977, 16, 217-232. Miller, G. Images and models, similies and metaphors. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. O'Neill, B., & Paivio, A. Semantic constraints in encoding judgments and free recall of concrete and abstract sentences. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 1978, 32, 3-18. Ortony, A. Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Paivio, A. Imagery and verbal process. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1971 (Reprinted Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 1971). Paivio, A. Psychological processes in the comprehension of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Paivio, A., & Marschark, M. Comparative judgments of animal intelligence and pleasantness. Memory and Cognition, 1980, 8, 39-48. Pollio, H., & Burns, B. The anomaly of anomaly. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1977, 6, 247-260. Reichmann, P., & Coste, E. Mental imagery and the comprehension of figurative language: Is there a relationship? In R. Honeck & R. Hoffman (Eds.), Cognition and figurative language. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 1980. Skinner, B. F. Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1957. Tourangeau, R., & Sternberg, R. J. Aptness in metaphor. Cognitive Psychology, 1981, 13, 27-55. Verbrugge, R. Resemblances in language and perception. In R. E. Shaw & J. D. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, acting, and knowing: Toward an ecological psyshology. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 1977.

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Verbrugge, R., & McCarrell, N. Metaphoric comprehension: Studies in reminding and resembling. Cognitive Psychology, 1977, 9, 494-533. Ziff, P. On understanding "understanding utterances." In J. Fodor & J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

APPENDIX

Example of Complete Instructional Set Metaphor goodness. This study is concerned with your understanding of metaphors. A metaphor is a type of sentence in which one object is compared to another in a non-literal way. For example, consider the following non-metaphor sentence: "An airplane is a vehicle." This sentence related airplanes and vehicles. It is not a metaphor because the relationship is one that is literal since an airplane is a type of vehicle. Contrast the earlier sentence with this one: " A n airplane is a migrating bird." In this case an airplane is related to a bird. It is a metaphor because literally speaking an airplane is not a bird. Nonetheless, you probably can interpret and get the point of this sentence: an airplane is like a bird because it can fly, because of its shape, perhaps because both are beautiful, and so on. In this experiment you will be presented with a set of sentences, all of which are metaphors. We are interested in determining how good you think the metaphor is. Some metaphors describe a situation or make a comparison in an extremely apt and pleasing way. Other metaphors are poor descriptions or figures of speech. In this task we are interested in how good you think each of the sentences are. Those sentences which you think are good metaphors should be given a high rating whereas those which you believe are poor metaphors should be given a low rating.