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A Cognitive Approach To Body Metaphor

Posted on:2007-02-04Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:X R GaoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360182999780Subject:English Language and Literature
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Scholars interested in language such as rhetoricians have done many researches on metaphor for more than 2000 years. Yet in recent years, metaphor has attracted the attention of scholars in cognitive linguistics. They hold that metaphor is a fundamental way for human beings to cognize the world and it is an important means of man's thinking. As a basic cognitive structure, metaphor allows us to comprehend a relatively abstract concept by virtue of a more concrete concept.The cognitive law that man cognizes things from the near to the far, from entity to non-entity, from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract determines the basic role of human body in cognizing the world. By means of the body organs and parts they are mostly familiar with, people often form body metaphorical concepts, so as to know about, experience and feel about the metaphorical concepts of other domains. Therefore, body metaphor is in nature a kind of conceptual metaphor, and it is a main cognitive method of human beings. By means of body metaphor, people perceive and understand the complicated and abstract concepts. At the same time, body metaphor reveals that human body and the embodied experience play an important role in people's understanding the outside world. Up to now, some scholars have made a delicate classification and contrastive study of body metaphor in English and Chinese. And some scholars have done studies on body metaphor from the perspective of word-formation. However, the study on body metaphor with modern metaphor theory is still not enough. In view of this fact, this thesis approaches body metaphor with the cognitive metaphor theory.This thesis carries out the study of body metaphor through six chapters. The first chapter reviews the researches on metaphor in cognitive linguistics at home and abroad, presents the significance of the study on body metaphor, and introduces the organization of this thesis. The second chapter provides a general statement of the theoretical framework of this thesis, in which metaphorical mapping, conceptual metaphor, and image schema are introduced. This chapter paves the way for the study of body metaphor from the cognitivepoint of view. The next three chapters are the main parts of this thesis. On the basis of the theory introduced in Chapter Two, these three chapters approach body metaphor from the three aspects: metaphorical mapping concerning body metaphor;conceptual metaphors concerning body metaphor;image schemata concerning body metaphor. They are the application of cognitive metaphor theory in analyzing language phenomenon, and conversely the study of body metaphor proves the cognitive theory on metaphor. In conclusion, it points out that this study is still a tentative study from the cognitive perspective and much has to be judged and tested.
Keywords/Search Tags:body metaphor, metaphorical mapping, conceptual metaphor, image schema, cognition
PDF Full Text Request
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