A Cognitive Stylistic Approach To Vision Conceptual Metaphor In Literary Texts

The research of metaphor has always been a hot issue for scholars at home and abroad. Traditional research views metaphor as one of the rhetoric devices. But with the development of cognitive linguistics in the last few decades, it is deemed as a way of thinking and cognition. Embodied philosophy believes that human cognition stems from the interaction between body and space, and that all of the basic conceptual metaphors take root in people's experience of life. As is known to all, vision is one of the predominant and most direct approaches to experiencing the world and obtaining information, therefore, studying conceptual metaphor related to the sense of vision, which is called vision conceptual metaphor (VCM for short) in this thesis, can deepen our understanding of the working mechanism of conceptual metaphors.There are abundant vision metaphorical expressions in both English and Chinese. Although conceptual metaphors have been studied by many scholars, and VCM, as a part of them, has been considered important, yet not enough research has been done systematically on it. Moreover, the past relevant researches are only confined to a single language without a unified and systematic analytical framework.The present study tries to analyze the universality and diversity in the use of VCM in both English and Chinese based on a comparative study. The study is taken on the basis of conceptual blending theory (CBT) from a cognitive stylistic perspective, so as to illuminate the working mechanism of VCM in literary texts, i.e. how it functions as the conveyance of views, ideas and emotions, and what implications it renders on the style of the literary works.The present study chooses two renowned literary works as the sources of data, namely, the English novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and the Chinese novel The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin. The project aims to answer the following questions:1) how does VCM work in literary works? 2) how does VCM influence the style of literary works? and 3) what are the similarities and distinctions in the use of VCM in English and Chinese literary works?VCMs used in literary texts can be divided into four groups according to the different target domain, that is, the category of idea, the category of judgment, the category of expectation and the category of behavior. The present study demonstrates that VCMs are frequently used in both English and Chinese literary works, and they play an important role in conveying the writer's ideas and emotions. They also have significant implications on the style of literary works. On the other hand, the comparison of VCMs in the two languages shows that a large proportion of VCMs are shared by the two languages, while there are also some particular VCMs in each language.This thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter serves as a brief introduction of the present study, including the research background, the objectives of the study, the significance of the study, the data collection and the methodology, etc.The second chapter is literature review. It gives a critical review of the previous researches on VCM, and then discusses the identification and classification of VCM. After the review, it is pointed out that there are insufficient researches on VCM used in literary works.The third chapter introduces the theoretical framework. It gives an introduction of cognitive stylistics and the cognitive linguistic theories that are used to analyze conceptual metaphors, including conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory. At the end of this chapter, the author works out the integration of the two in order to analyze VCM from a cognitive stylistic perspective.The fourth chapter is about data description and the distribution of VCMs in the data. In this chapter, the two literary works chosen as the corpus are introduced. Then the author talks about the methods of analysis, including the qualitative method and the comparative method. After that, the distribution and classification of VCMs used in the corpus are described for the convenience of the analysis in the next chapter.The fifth chapter explores the functions of VCM while conveying ideas and emotions, and finds out the similarities and differences between the working of VCM in English and Chinese literary texts. Based on the result of the analysis, the author tries to discuss the stylistic implications of VCM in literary works.The last chapter is a conclusion of the thesis. It sums up the main findings and results of the present study, points out the contributions and limitations of this research, and finally gives some suggestions for future study.