Cognitive Study Of Metaphors In The Fellowship Of The Ring

The Lord of the Rings is the works of J.R.R.Tolkien who is the Middle ages Scholar, Linguistics, British novelist, it is one of the best-sellers in the western world during the20th century. At present, the novels have been translated by more than40different languages, at the beginning of twenty-first century, the glorious achievement of its cognominal film has aroused people’s attention to Tolkien’s epic fantasy literature. It applies the complex and volatile structure of the magic plot. The contents include the rich and exhaustive background knowledge referring to geography, religion, language and nation and so on. And the repeatedly use of descriptive skills of metaphors make it possess a high level of culture. There are many researches on The Lord of the Rings which are restricted to the fields of Hermeneutics, translator’s subjectivity, cultural analysis, the literary values, the literary characters and the literariness of the fiction; and the perspective of consumption concept, cross-cultural communication and some movie works. Furthermore, there are more scholars whose researches are confined to culture and translation and so on, but, there have been few researches on its cognitive metaphors. So this thesis will discuss the metaphors in the novel The Fellowship of The Ring from the perspective of cognitive metaphors.This thesis makes a overview of metaphors’history, the modern perspective view of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Conceptual Blending Theory and their mapping orientations have been introduced. Furthermore, the metaphorical examples in the novel The Fellowship of the Rings have been discussed and analyzed. And conclusions can be made as follows:Firstly, the data have confirmed the viewpoint by Lakoff and Johnson:Metaphors are pervasive in everyday life. Not only in the daily life, but also in the composition of the novels. Secondly, the Conceptual Blending Theory and The Conceptual Metaphor Theory are all significant for studying the cognitive metaphors in the cognitive progress of human, texts creating and texts understanding. This thesis has applied the cognitive metaphor theories to the text study. And the novel is recognized and reconstructed with the mechanism of metaphors, thus forming the new meaning, which can provide a new perspective for the readers to understand.Thirdly, the metaphors in the novel are diverse, and can prompt the new ideas and new knowledge, so that the readers can further understand the important role of cognitive metaphors in the novel.Lastly, the thesis analyzes metaphors in the novel from the cognitive construction and working mechanism, which provides readers a better understanding of connotations and the language features of cognitive metaphors from English context.This thesis aims to discuss metaphors collected in The Fellowship of The Ring, according to the mechanism of cognitive metaphors and analyzes the similarity, the cognitive studies on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Conceptual Blending Theory, so that the readers can understand metaphors in different cultural contexts.