Explorations Into Metaphor In EST Discourse

In recent years, with the fast development of science and technology, scientific discourse plays a more and more important role in people's daily lives especially in their scientific activities. While owing to the international po pularity of its language, English scientific discourse particularly draws worldwide attention. It is no exaggeration to say that only when a person fully understands English scientific discourse, can he enter the real world of advanced science and technology. However, under the influence of logical positivism, science is traditionally acknowledged to be an enterprise that probes into the unknown world and should be described in terms of literal language, it is seldom associated with metaphor - a typical means of rhetoric. Different from traditional ones, contemporary theories take metaphor no longer as a figurative device which is attachable to language, but as a way of recognizing the world or reshaping human experience. On the basis of contemporary metaphor theories, this thesis does a comparatively overall research on the phenomenon of metaphorical use of language in EST.The metaphorical use of language in EST can be analyzed at two levels. One is lexical level, at which metaphor is called lexical metaphor. Lexical metaphor has been the focus of metaphor research since Aristotle. The book Metaphor We Live By published in 1980, written by Lakoff and Johnson, embodies the total beginning of lexical metaphor research from cognitive perspective. Lexical metaphors in EST are mostly nominal metaphors to a great extent, which help us to recognize those strange, abstract, or unknown things in scientific field with the experience familiar or known to us in our daily life. Apart from nominal metaphor, there are verbal metaphor, adjective metaphor, prepositional metaphor and adverbial metaphor in EST. The use of these kinds of metaphor in EST reflects the cognitive function of metaphor. It is on the basic of some similarities that metaphor builds up the association between scientific concepts and daily experiences and then helps people achieve their cognitive about scientific things and even about the whole world. These kinds of metaphors on the basis of similarities can be called "similarities-based metaphors". There is a kind of metaphor which helps people recognize scientific concepts by creating the similarities between them and daily experiences. This kind of metaphor is called "similarity-creative metaphor". Similarity-creative metaphor reflects the process of human beings' more active cognition about new things.The other one is at lexico-grammatical metaphor level, and metaphor at this level is named by functional grammar school as grammatical metaphor. Grammatical metaphor is the metaphorical use of grammatical forms. Although it is often accompanied by the variation of lexical meanings, essentially it is variation of grammatical function and reflects the process of reshaping human experience. Grammatical metaphor not only breaks the limitation of lexical metaphor research theoretically, but also enhances the features of scientific precision, conciseness and objectivity practically.From the analysis at the two levels, we can see the whole picture of metaphorical use of language in EST. Moreover, we can find the perfect combination of two kinds of metaphors in it, the variety and colorfulness in content and conciseness and objectivity in form.