A Study On The Conceptual Metaphors In The Gospels Of Bible From Cognitive Perspective

In 1980,in the book Metaphors We Live By,George Lakoff and Mark Johnson creatively proposed Conceptual Metaphor Theory,which caused a revolution in cognitive linguistics.Compared with the previous view of natural endowment of language generation,the new cognitive view claimed that the generation,learning and use of language should be explained by human cognition,and that cognitive ability was the foundation of human knowledge.Since then,a large number of linguistic facts had proved that language had a close correlation with cognitive structure.Cognitive linguistics began to study metaphor from the perspective of cognitive science,and metaphor had cognitive function.The Bible is a literary classic,which reflects the author's perception and understanding of the world by means of language.As the cornerstone of Western culture and thought,Bible contains a wealth of philosophical and moral judgments,so many scholars regard Bible as the highlight of language and literature research.In recent years,people begin to study the language art embodied in Bible from various perspectives,including rhetoric,literature,theology,culture and other different perspectives.Bible is full of metaphors,but few scholars use cognitive results to analyze religious texts.Most scholars are limited to the rhetorical level of language.Conceptual Metaphor Theory is an essential part of cognitive metaphor research and a cognitive phenomenon of human beings.The study of metaphor in Bible has gone through thousands of years.From rhetoric studies in ancient Greece to cognitive metaphor studies in modern and contemporary times,it has distinct characteristics of the times and important research value.Therefore,based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this thesis conducted a cognitive analysis of metaphors in the Gospels of Bible,and concretely analyzed the three forms of conceptual metaphors in the corpus to test the explanatory power of these theories,at the same time,to prove the metaphorical nature of human thinking and the universality of metaphorical thinking.In this study,quantitative,qualitative and descriptive methods were used to collect data from the total 89 chapters of four Gospels of Bible.These data were of the same type of metaphor and expressed the same metaphorical meaning.At the same time,this thesis applied Image Schema Theory to the analysis of four Gospels of Bible so as to explore more comprehensively and accurately how the author expresses his thoughts and feelings through familiar concepts.Through in-depth analysis,The conclusions of this study are as follows:The essence of metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon,not a simple linguistic phenomenon.Metaphor is a universal way of thinking and a widely used means of expression in literary works.In Gospels of Bible,Jesus used various metaphorical languages in his preaching.This thesis made a detailed analysis of these metaphorical languages and revealed that the interpretation of cognitive metaphors in Bible was an effective cognitive means in line with human thinking patterns.The study found that biblical metaphor was characterized by mapping abstract religious information with the help of specific things that people know as the source domain.It expresses the preaching information in a single sentence with a profound story.Cognition of Biblical metaphor can construct the spatial structure relationship through the characteristics and connections between the source domain and the target domain.It is operable to use image schema to analyze metaphorical cognition in Gospels of Bible.Metaphor is not only a kind of language skills used by human beings,but also a universal way of thinking.It is the central link of cognitive ability,responsible for the creation,dissemination and reproduction of meaning.People's understanding of metaphor has deepened from rhetorical level to cognitive level.It is a cognitive tool for people to conceptualize abstract categories.