A Corpus - Based Study On Children 's Metaphorical Expression

Metaphor is a kind of mind mapping,it is a of a way of thinking which connect things in different domain of mind skillfully. As thinking can not be directly observed, this paper attempts to start research from the children’s daily conversation, which we could know from the side of the basic situation of children using metaphors. I collect examples of pure children metaphor from the age of 4 years old children with 40,000 words,5 years old with 30,000 words,6 years old with 23,000 words, and in accordance with the container metaphor, personification, entity metaphor, orientational metaphor, structural metaphor, novel metaphor and so on. I type those metaphors and make a the preliminary conclusion as:Based on the results of corpus statistics,we tend to agree the viewpoint that children’s metaphorical expression is a continuous development. When we calculate the frequency of metaphorical expression be used in each ten of thousand words, the six years old children do the best. the five years old children get the second and the four years old children is the last. There is less difference in content dimension of each age children,The difference is in the range of five dimensions. Beside, children’s metaphorical expression ability can be affected by many factors,it’s hard for us to divide obvious period.Most of the young children’s metaphorical expression are acquired. For children,entity metaphor and container metaphor are the most familiar type of metaphor.In the three ages of corpus, Children’s acquired metaphor expression is greater than the original metaphor expression in both quantity and content.The entity metaphor is a metaphor for the children to use at most, the container metaphor is the second one.Young children’s metaphor expression is restricted by the life experiences. Through the analysis of metaphorical expression examples that we collected of different age children,we could see those expression are restricted by the life field, and there are no metaphorical expression beyond their own experience.For example,there are no children can skillfully project the space domain to the time domain, the state domain, and use the up, down concept to compare social status, the quality of the goods.Young children’s metaphorical expression has the characteristics of the animism, novelty, and tend to the self-centered cognitive mode. Children tend to take various things as human beings,and transfer the characteristics of human beings into them, like speaking, thinking and so on. A direct result of this thinking is that always describe things as an animistic objects.In short,4-6 years old children’s metaphorical expression is given priority to with acquisition. At the same time they also have a certain ability to create.For children,entity metaphor and container metaphor are the most familiar type of metaphor. Young children’s metaphorical expressing grows with the age in a continuous way. Many factors like experience,cognitive mode affect the development of children’ metaphorical expression.