Chinese xiehouyu (歇 后 语) and the interpretation of metaphor and metonymy

Xiehouyu is a linguistic phenomenon unique to Chinese. A xiehouyu normally follows or precedes something said or some statement, which serves as the topic, and the saying is a kind of vehicle plus explanation about the topic. This study, based on a corpus of 1000 Chinese xiehouyus , PUCC (Peking University Chinese Corpus) and some questionnaire surveys, finds that xiehouyus differ from other types of metaphor or metonymies in that the explanation of a xiehouyu is always spelled out when first used, or used when addressing someone who the speaker supposes is not familiar with the phrase. This gives a xiehouyu the advantage of selecting anything that might bear some similarity or contiguity relationship to the discourse topic to trigger or comment on the topic. But paradoxically, in actual usage, either the antecedent or the consequent may sometimes be omitted, especially when the xiehouyu in case has been “entrenched” or is relatively familiar to the speaker or hearer. This indicates that either the antecedent or the consequent just serves as a trigger for a connection between the topic and vehicle or the ground. The study also finds that in some cases (about 30%), the selection of a vehicle in a xiehouyu is random, which suggests that in using a phrase like this, the speaker is more interested in creating a special (often humorous or comic) discourse effect than using the metaphor or metonymy to achieve a cognitive effect, thus the more interpersonal nature of certain types of metaphorical language.