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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
As one of the most common figures of speech, personification has been usedconsciously or unconsciously in our daily communication and literary works, such aspoetry, prose, fairy tales, myths, proverbs and idioms. The accurate use ofpersonification can enhance the expressive force to achieve a good communicativepurpose.The study of personification goes all the way back to Erasmus and Quintilian(Aletta G. Dorst, 2011, p. 1). In 1980s, with the development of studies on cognitivemetaphor, personification begins to be classified as one of the most basic ontologicalmetaphors by cognitive linguists (K?vecses, 2002; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and beinvolved in the discussion about its difference from metaphor and metonymy (Lakoffand Johnson, 1980; Lakoff and Turner, 1989). In China, personification has beenstudied for more than 80 years as one of Chinese traditional literary and artistictechniques of expression. The earliest personification appeared in pre-Qin literature,such as The Book of Songs, Chu Ci.According to the previous studies, most of the scholars in China focus on thestructure, categories, functions and specific usages of personification. Although theyhave achieved a lot of academic accomplishment, the scope of research is limitedwithin the micro perspectives. They do not adopt linguistic theories, such ascognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and advanced research methods toconduct systematic and theoretical research on personification often. Based on theprevious studies, Liao Qiaoyun (2015) put forward a new semantic rhetoric construalframework, Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model (ADRIM). Thismodel indicates that the construal of rhetoric discourse, under the guidance ofintentionality, is an abductive reasoning procedure from explicit expression to implicit expression and at last achieve the communicative intention. The extractionof possible feature is an essential part in the whole process. Pan Xiang (2016), Tanzhipeng (2016) etc. have testified the semantic rhetoric construal framework (LiaoQiaoyun, 2015) by using Chinese metaphors, puns, etc. as experiment materials. Incurrent study, we use Chinese personification as materials to verify the theoreticalframework further.
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1.2 Research Objective
The aim of the present study is to utilize ERPs to testify the Chinese semanticrhetoric construal mechanism ADRIM through exploring the psychological reality ofpossible feature extraction in the construal of Chinese personification. This presentstudy gives electrophysiological evidence of the accessibility of this framework.According to the previous studies, the differences in the amplitudes of the threeERPs components, N100, N400 and LPC can reflect the differences in the construalof rhetorical and literal words. N100 is related to the selective attention; N400 isrelated to semantic processing with semantic conflict; and LPC (late positivecomponent) is related to the episodic memory which reflects the relatedness of newinformation to recently encountered information. Based on the analysis of thedifferences in the amplitudes of each ERPs component between literal sentence andrhetorical one, we can understand the construal of rhetorical sentence. Moreover, wecan verify the Annotation-Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model further.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 I