A Cognitive Study Of The Metaphors In Inner Mongolia Grassland Song Lyrics

In the history of language, people study metaphor for a long time. Metaphor is considered only a figure of speech that implies comparison between two different entities, as distinguished from simile, and explicit comparison signaled by’like’or ’as’in the traditional rhetoric. While in the newly rising cognitive linguistics, metaphor is the tool that is indispensable. The publication of Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) is the mark of the beginning of the new theory of metaphor. Lakoff s conceptual metaphor theory argues that the conceptual system of human being is largely metaphorical. This metaphorical conceptual system is reflected in language, human behavior, sign languages and so on. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another (Lakoff&Johnson,1980:5).As the conceptual device of us metaphor plays an indispensable role in human conceptualization. According to the cognitive approach, metaphor is a universal phenomenon in ordinary language which arises from mapping among different cognitive domains, especially the mapping from the concrete (source) domains to the abstract (target) domains, and that metaphors are based on our bodily and physical experience. Cognitive approach to metaphor is grounded philosophically on experientialism, category and image schema, which are the basis of a cognitive linguistic study. When we refer to the working mechanism of metaphor Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT, which is also called Conceptual Integration Theory, that is CIT) should be included. Conceptual Metaphor Theory holds that metaphor works by mapping from the source domain to the target domain; while as a complement to the mapping theory, Conceptual Blending Theory claims that metaphor arises from the simultaneous interaction among four mental spaces, with the result of blended space and emergent structure. This thesis will elaborate them by investigating metaphors in grassland song lyrics.Just as everyone knows, music is a kind of expression of one’s emotion and has a closely relationship with our own life. However, it seems that very few researchers have done on this area, especially in grassland songs, which belongs to the language of minority group-Mongolian. This thesis carries out a cognitive study on metaphors in grassland song lyrics(the author only choose those songs sung in Chinese as the analysis target in the thesis),using CMT and CBT to analyze metaphors and describing the working mechanism of metaphor with the aim of supporting and perfecting the contemporary cognitive theory of metaphor. The present work is just a tentative research as a first try to dig out the linguistic features of this unique discourse. On the one hand the relatively studies in this field are few, and on the other hand the author’s knowledge and learning is insufficient and limited, it needs further research by scholars and interested professors in this field.