A Metaphor Study Of "Qian,Hou"

The metaphor has a long history and became the emphasis of many schloars 2000 years ago. Traditionally, the metaphor used to be considered a decorative and rhetorical language expression. However, in recent years the viewpoint of the people on the metaphor has a major change. The metaphor and its structure,operating mechanism,function and cognitive features have become the hot topics of Linguistics, Anthropology, Philosophy, Psychology, Pedagogy etc.Among them,the cognitive function of metaphor became the core and has been universivally accepted. Cognitivists thought metaphor is not only a rhetorical language,but also a kind of thinking model.They also considered metaphor is an effective cognitive method to recognize abstract things with the aid of concrete things.Spatial metaphor reognized abstract concept with the aid of concrete concept. The close relationship between Human beings and the Space enables the spatial metaphor to have animportant influence on humanity's cognition history.This paper is divided into five parts.In the first part,we summarized the history of metaphor's study,we introduced the metaphor's present study and the spactial metaphor's research abroad and at home briefly and their shortcomings.Then we introduced the research materials and research methods.In the second part,we abstracted some words included"qian,hou"from three authority dictionaries and erceted two corpuses included"qian,hou".Their numbers are 401 and 357. On the basis of corpuses,we discussed the appearance of"qian,hou"in the space domain.Human beings knew the world around them by their bodies.The space domain mapped to the other domains and we found the time domain and relationship domain.In time domain,the space word"qian"can be mapped to the meaning of past time,future time,ahead of some time and thhings,it also meaned the present time."Hou"can be mapped to future time or later some time or things.In relationship domain,they both meaned logic relationship,interpersonal relationship,relative relationship and sequence relationship.In lexical system,there are cross-domain phenominons.The space domain of"qian,hou"mapped to the other domains,such as time domain,relationship domain.Thus,their meaning turned into time relationship and interpersonal relationship.In time domain,we found"qian"can be regarded as present time. On the basis of previous research,we discussed the other metaphorical extension of"qian,hou".They also can be extended to states,social hierarchy and scope except for time, relationship.In the third part,we abstracted some sentences included"qian,hou"from The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese and erected two corpuses.Their numbers are 580 and 750.Then we discussed them from space domain,time domain and relationship domain and drew some conclusions.When they mapped to the other domains, they both turned to the meaning of past time,future time and ahead of or later some time or things.Besides,"qian"also can be mapped to the present time.In relationship domain,they both meaned logic relationship,interpersonal relationship and sequence relationship.We also analysized their context meaning from the context circumstances.They can be mapped to states,scopes,social hiearchy and quantity.In the sentence circumstances , there was no corss-domian phenomenons.This showed context makes the meaning single.We also discussed the metaphor of"qian,hou"from lexical and syntax.In the fourth part,we discussed teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Through the analysis of the meaning of space and time of"qian,hou", we drew some conclusions on emphasis and difficulties about teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Then we discussed the teaching contents,teaching methods,teaching tactics and teaching instruments—multimedia techology ,web and so on.And we thought they should make an important influence on teaching Chinese as a foreign language.We think the Practicability is the most important method in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.The fifth part is the conclusion of the study.It also forcasts the follow-up work and points out some problems in the study.