A Corpus-based Approach To Lexicalized Metaphors In English

Early since people began their research on language, metaphor has been an obsessing problem for both the linguists and philosophers. Based on the universal recognition of the importance of metaphor, the study of metaphor has now been developed into a comprehensive subject that covers linguistic, cultural, philosophical, even scientific field of study and has a big number of branch subjects, like poetic metaphor, verbal and non-verbal metaphor, grammatical metaphor, lexical metaphor, discourse metaphor, etc. Metaphor has no longer been taken as a deviation from the regular language, which is merely a device of the figure of speech for decoration but as one of the most important ways for us to perceive this world and for language to develop. Among different branch studies of metaphor, lexicalized metaphors, which serve very well as the most concrete, stable and robust evidence for the ubiquity of metaphor undoubtedly deserve the attention and interests from all linguists. Although since the 1980s, lexicalized metaphor does receive a great deal of attention from linguists, especially since the breakthrough of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We live by (1980), yet so far there has not been a specialized study on lexicalized metaphor and its influence on the metaphor study on a whole. This thesis is a study on lexicalized metaphors and is an examination of the theoretical system of metaphor on the basis of lexical evidence. From a big number of lexical evidences carefully chosen from the metaphor corpus---metalude, which is built up by Andrew Goatly, this thesis studies lexicalized metaphors with the bottom-up method, offering a general frame of lexical metaphor in an answer to questions like how lexicalized metaphors are organized in an organic system, how lexicalized metaphors finally find their position in the dictionary, how they structure English lexicon and how lexicalized metaphors are represented in different word-classes. Also plenty evidences for the existing theories of metaphor are provided and the connection among metaphor, culture and the development of lexis is explored.