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ntroduction
This chapter presents a comprehensive picture of the previous studies onpersonification. First, we will briefly introduce the various definitions, categoriesand functions of personification. Second, we will review the studies and researcheson personification from rhetoric, pragmatic, semantic and cognitive perspectives.Third, there is a brief introduction about ERPs technique and important ERPscomponents related to the present study. At last, special attention is given to thetheoretical model of Chinese semantic rhetoric construal mechanism,Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model (ADRIM).
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2.2 Personification Revisited
The earliest study on personification was within the scope of rhetoric. As theadvances in cognitive linguistics, metaphor is no longer regarded as a commonrhetoric, but a way of thinking. Personification, of course, considered as one of themetaphors, begin to be studied from the perspective of cognitive linguistics too.In the development of Western grammar and rhetoric theory, at first,'personification' is not a fixed name. Sometimes it's called ' prosopopoeia ' , aGreek word, meaning 'a face, a person,' which is used to describe an action or abehavior from other perspectives (Zhang Xiao, 2010). However, 'personification' isnot equivalent to ' prosopopoeia ', though their meanings are basically the same.Aristotle in Rhetoric says that personification is 'a common used device that Homer endowed inanimate objects with metaphorical life' (Paxon, 1994, p. 12).Personification is recognized as a kind of metaphor and called 'Personal Metaphor,in western rhetoric (Nesfield et al, 1964, pp. 272-273), Bander (1978, p. 176) definespersonification as the rhetoric device that attributes human qualities and abilities toinanimate objects, animals, abstractions, and events'. As cognitive metaphordevelops, personification is defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) as an ontologicalmetaphor with a cross-domain mapping in which an object or entity ‘is furtherspecified as being a person’. They emphasize that ‘personification is not a singleunified general process’ and each personification ‘differs in terms of the aspects ofpeople that are picked out’ (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 33). Later, Lakoff andTurner (1989) discuss personification in relation to the EVENTS ARE ACTIONSmetaphor, which allows people to ‘conceive of agentless events as if they werecaused by agents’. Mac Kay (1986, p. 87) hold that personification spreads humancognition and is often disguised in other figurative devices such as metonymies,spatial metaphors, and container metaphors. Webster's Encyclopedic UnabridgedDictionary of the English Language (1980, p. 1075) defines personification: 'afigure of speech in which a thing, quality, or idea is represented as a person”.
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Chapter Three Methodology........30
3.1 Introduction............30
3.2 Research Question.......... 30
3.3 Research Design.... 31
3.4 Method..........32
Chapter Four Results and Discussion............38
4.1 Behavioral Data Results and Analysis.......38
4.2 ERPs Results..........404.3 Discussions............ 48
4.3.1 Differences of Possible Feature Extraction in RT Studies........... 48
4.3.2 Differences of Possible Feature Extraction in Cognitive Mechanism........... 50
4.3.3 Differences of Possible Feature Extraction in Brain Areas..........5