Applications And Interpretation Of Metaphors In Verbal Communication

Verbal communication is the most fundamental form of human communication. In order to achieve certain purpose, participants adopt various skills or techniques of which metaphor is the most frequent one. Richards once points out "metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language". Our daily verbal-communication is imbued with metaphors. The study of metaphor endures a long history. From the scope or the approach of the study metaphor has been viewed mainly as a Rhetoric or Semantic concept.This paper, integrated with the description of different classifications of metaphors, mainly elucidates the wide applications of metaphors in education, politics and science, and focuses on the interpretation of metaphor from pragmatic approach. From the pragmatic perspective metaphor is actually implicature, resulting from the violation of the quality maxim of cooperative principle in conversation. Meanwhile, as a pragmatic phenomenon, the recognition and interpretation of metaphor are inseparable from context, especially social or culture context. Therefore, metaphor is not only a language phenomenon, and it is in fact also a kind of thinking mechanism, so the study of metaphor based on human cognition is suggested in this paper.