A Cognitive Approach To Metaphor And Its Significance

This thesis first makes a general survey of the traditional study of metaphor, analyzing thetheory of each school and indicating its weaknesses and limitation. According to the cognitive approach, metaphor is not a matter of rhetoric language but amatter of thought, a point that is fully developed and construed in Lakoff's theory of"conceptual metaphor." Conceptual metaphor, consisting of three types—orientationalmetaphor, ontological metaphor and structural metaphor, and two special types (deadmetaphor and synaesthesia) are analyzed in detail. The features of conceptual metaphor,namely systematicity and coherence, indicate that metaphorical expressions are not structuredarbitrarily but are organized systematically under one conceptual metaphor and conceptualmetaphors are coherently related to each other. Cognitive approach to metaphor is grounded philosophically on experientialism andimage schema, which are the basis of cognitive linguistic study. The main ideas of workingmechanism of metaphor include Lakoff's mapping of conceptual metaphor, and Fauconnierand Turner's blending theory. The former holds that metaphor works by mapping from thesource domain to the target domain; the latter, as a complement to the mapping theory, claimsthat metaphor arises from the simultaneous interaction among four mental spaces, with theresult of blended space and emergent structure. The cognitive function of metaphor enables us to conceptualize our experience and toperceive the world from a totally new standpoint. Conceptual metaphor is an essential way insecond language (L2) teaching and learning because many problems appearing in writing andculture can be traced back to their origin of metaphors, and hence students'ability to study theL2 can be greatly improved by the acquisition of metaphorical competence.