A Cognitive Study On Metaphor In Literature

literature plays an important role in human's spiritual and social life. Compared with other styles, literature genre has a strong dualism in meanings, that is to say, there is often a distance between the surface meaning and the deep meaning in literary language. The metaphorical meaning in literature has always been the focus of literary criticism and the linguistic study.In traditional research, metaphor is only a variation of ordinary language and a rhetorical phenomenon; in addition, metaphorical expressions are excluded from ordinary language. The traditional theory now faces the challenge of modem metaphor research: metaphor is "an omnipresent principle in language"; metaphorical meaning is "a semantic mapping in two semantic fields" (I.A.Richards, 1994). Metaphor in traditional rhetoric is redefined as "metaphor expression", which is a surface meaning mapping in cross-semantic fields. Metaphor now is a human thinking phenomenon and "all languages are metaphorical" (Lakoff, 1980).This thesis aims to explain and analyze the mechanism and use of metaphor from a cognitive point of view. Cognitive linguistics has abandoned the idea that metaphor is only a figure of speech. Instead, many scholars now hold that metaphors are cognitive processes that help to create and maintain people's view of culture and play a significant role in their capacity to conceive expressions in literature. As a basic cognitive structure, metaphor helps us to comprehend a relatively abstract concept by virtue of a more concrete concept, which is thus called conceptual metaphor. The comprehension and use of metaphor is based on the common notion of the author and the target language readers when reading metaphors in Chinese and English works, that is to say, the author and the reader must have the same cognitive conception to the vehicle. The nature of metaphor is to understand and experience an object through another object (Lakoff, 1980). Therefore, metaphor must deal with two cognitive fields and it's a semantic interaction in two cognitive fields. This thesis makes a relatively detailed study on the use of metaphor in literature as well as the contrastive study on comprehension and analysis of metaphors in both Chinese and English works from the cognitive perspective instead of the traditional viewpoint of metaphor. The thesis introduces blending theory and conceptual theory, as well as the mechanism of metaphor that includes mapping (source domain to target domain) and integration. This research reinforces and develops some theories of the contemporary cognitive approach to metaphor: Abstract concepts are largely conceptualized and comprehended via metaphor; and conceptual metaphor is characterized by cognitive universality and cultural relativity. In addition, this research will, to a certain extent, be helpful and instructive for teaching English and Chinese literature in class.