Cognitive Study Of Metaphors In The Little Prince

As the most popular fairy tale, The Little Prince has been translated into more than one hundred languages. It is also the most widely-read book except the Bible. However, the researches on The Little Prince are no match for other masterpieces both in amount and quality. Nearly a half of the researches on The Little Prince are just appreciation of the work from the perspective of philosophy of life, value and theme. Apart from these, the researches focus on its symbolic meaning. There is only one article analyzing the love metaphor in The Little Prince and there is no comprehensive study of metaphors in The Little Prince. Thus, this thesis makes a comprehensive analysis of the metaphors in The Little Prince based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory in order to demonstrate the feasibility to apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory to the analysis of metaphorical texts, to find out the relationships among the metaphors in The Little Prince and to conclude the features of metaphors in the context of a metaphorical discourse. Firstly, this thesis divides the metaphors in The Little Prince into three levels:root metaphor, conceptual metaphor and textual metaphor. The relationship among the three levels is also illustrated. Secondly, the features of the metaphors in The Little Prince are concluded:experientialism and unconsciousness, contradictoriness and uniformity, systematicness and restrictiveness, subjectivity and context-dependence. Lastly, the metaphors of plants, animal, human beings, objects, relationships, plot and theme in The Little Prince are analyzed from five aspects according to Wang Yin’s "Five in One" working mechanism:source domain, target domain, ground, cognitive subject and context. This thesis makes its contribution from three aspects. Firstly, the feasibility to apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory to the analysis of metaphorical text is testified. Secondly, the features of metaphors in the context of a metaphorical discourse are concluded. Lastly, this thesis finds out that metaphors in The Little Prince are not disorganized. They can be grouped into different levels which may offer reference for later studies of textual metaphors.