The Cognitive Study On Metaphor And The Cultivation Of Metaphorical Competence In Second Language Acquisition

Traditionally, metaphor is viewed as the ornament of language, but with the development of metaphorical study, it is much clear that metaphor serves as an important cognitive model which can be utilized to construct new meanings. Metaphorical competence, as the complement to linguistic competence and communicative competence, is a much higher demand to language learners. This thesis elaborates the working mechanism of metaphor by means of conceptual metaphor theory and analyzes the assistance of conceptual metaphor to SLA. This assistance by conceptual metaphor will be studied empirically combining input hypothesis aiming to discover approaches to cultivate English learners' metaphorical competence. Metaphor and SLA can both be studied from cognitive perspective, and the combined study could benefit each other. The aim of this thesis is to explore the model to cultivate English learners' metaphorical competence in order to find a proper way to aid Chinese learners in English metaphor learning.