A Cognitive Study Of Metaphors In The House On Mango Street

Nowadays, cognitive study on metaphor is a hot academic direction and it has a great developmental prospect in our country, so it attracts numerous scholars’attention. It cannot be denied that Metaphors We Live By (1980) has the most influential and explanatory power in the study of cognitive metaphor. From the cognitive perspective, metaphor is no longer restrictedly treated as a rhetoric method; it’s regarded as the general cognitive way. From this point of view, people can use metaphors to understand and create the relations between two different things. Metaphor has become an indispensible cognitive way in human life. Different communities have their metaphorical languages that only the members of a community can understand its metaphorical language. It is prominent in literary language, such as The House on Mango Street. The name of the book itself is a metaphor, which is hard to understand for people that don’t belong to Mango Street. The author of the book is Cisneros who has dual-identities:one is a Mexican living in the poor region of America, and another one is a female growing up under the suppression of the patriarchal culture. In the background of her own experience, she creates the heroine—Esperanza that is also a metaphor of the woman writer.More and more scholars begin to make use of the cognitive view of metaphor to analyze language phenomena. Unfortunately, nobody studies metaphors in The House on Mango Street. However, it is the metaphors that are the key to constructing and interpreting the book. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the metaphorical phenomena from the cognitive perspective. This dissertation comprehensively analyzes metaphors in the book from the cognitive perspective:on the one hand, it is a new exploration to the previous researches of the book; on the other hand, it offers great help for readers to understand and learn the book.The dissertation provides an overview of cognitive metaphor at first, then combining with the cognitive approach, it summarizes the classifications of metaphors and generalizes the main semantic features and functions of metaphors. With the support of these theories, the author of this dissertation analyzes metaphorical phenomena in The House on Mango Street and chooses examples to do specific analyses. The dissertation concludes that metaphor as a cognitive way not only decides how authors construct a text, but also determines how readers view the text.The dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter One introduces its research background, research purposes and issues, and the significance of the study. Chapter Two generalizes different scholars’researches on the theory of cognitive metaphor and the book—The House on Mango Street from the cognitive perspective. Chapter Three represents the classifications, semantic features and functions of metaphors from the cognitive perspective. Based on the theoretical knowledge of the previous chapters, Chapter Four summarizes the metaphorical phenomena in The House on Mango Street, and it illustrates their types, characteristics and functions. Chapter Five concludes the main findings and limitations of the dissertation and offers a proposal for the future research. Main findings of the dissertation include five aspects as follows:(1)Metaphors in The House on Mango Street can be classified into three types, namely, orientational metaphors, ontological metaphors and structural metaphors. Meanwhile, metaphors in the book have four semantic features, that is, inconsistency, systematcity, ambiguity and innovativeness. In addition, metaphors in the book have three functions, that is, cognitive function, language function and social function.(2)Metaphor is the method for Cisneros—the author of The House on Mango Street to organize her cognitive experience.(3)Different metaphors present the heroine—Esperanza’s feelings of different things.(4)A11the metaphors in the book center on the metaphor of "house" to reveal social conflicts.(5)Metaphors in the book transmit Cisneros’ cognition, attitude and expectation to her community.To sum up, the dissertation achieves a new study result and broadens the analytical method of The House on Mango Street, but it still has defects:first, owing to the author’s limited understanding of the cognitive metaphor, the analyses in the dissertation are not deep enough; second, because the chapters of the dissertation are limited, its author can’t list and explain all the metaphors in the book. The future research on the book can develop from such limitations in order to reinforce the depth and breadth of the study of the book.