Conceptual Metaphors Analysis On Cyberspeak Under Micro-era

Metaphors have been paid attention to by linguists since long time ago, but the perspective of metaphors which they once focused on is rhetorical, however, metaphor research on cognition has become a hot issue, since the publishing of “Metaphors We Live By” in 1980 by Lakoff and Johnson. Lakoff and Johnson understand and explain metaphors with the perspective of human thinking and they further put forward Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which believes that metaphors are in human’s thinking and cognition mode, so the way human beings understand the world is metaphorical. That is to say, Conceptual Metaphor Theory believes that metaphors are in some degree in human’s daily life. Lakoff illustrates the essence of metaphors which is to understand a complicated and abstract concept in terms of a similar and concrete concept.Cyberspeak is a major figure in the Internet era, and there are new-produced cyber words or sentences almost every day. So cyber words and sentences that are widely-used in a period is called cyberspeak. Internet is a virtual society, people let off their feelings and pressure on the Internet. And the popularity of micro-blog and Wechat leads the Internet into the micro-era, which demands netizens to use concise and accurate language to express and communicate with each other. If new-produced cyberspeak are metaphorical to some extant, then it means that human’s cognition is metaphorical. Therefore, conceptual metaphors in cyberspeak have great research value.The thesis analyzes and illustrates metaphors in cyberspeak with the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. All the examples are selected from two resources: cyberspeak from XINHUA WANGLUO CIDIAN and hot cyberspeak that have been used more than one million times in a month in micro-blog. And then the thesis illustrates the universality and importance of conceptual metaphors in cyberspeak, aiming to help people understand and use cyberspeak better.Besides, the thesis points out its limits, and it hopes to let people know that the usage of metaphors makes language colorful by analyzing metaphorical cyberspeak, and it also hopes that more people can explore the unknown fields of metaphor.