| There exist a great many metaphors in the Bible.The distribution of these metaphors is relatively scattered.For instance,in the Gospels,there are many conceptual metaphors conveyed through Jesus' parables,but in the Song of Songs and the Revelation,the metaphors in the majority are mainly conveyed by special images or objects in one single sentence.In the 1950 s,Wittgenstein came up with the famed theory of family resemblance.He holds that all members are connected in a similar way to form a category,but the status of these members belonging to a same category is different.In the 1970 s,in the field of metaphorical study,Lakoff and Johnson shifted people's attention to the field of cognition.Since then,the combination of metaphor and cognition has become a trend of significant research valued by many scholars.This thesis has mainly used the methodologies of comparative analysis and exemplification.This thesis uses Lakoff and Johnson's theory about conceptual metaphors and Wittgenstein's family resemblance theory to analyze the conceptual metaphors appearing in the Bible.It holds that the frequent use of metaphor in the Bible is to help convey abstract heavenly concept,differentiate between true and fake followers and create room for scripture interpretation.It also finds that although the metaphors in the Bible are scattered in a large number,these metaphorical concepts have their own classification system.Through the comparison between the traditional rhetorical view and the conceptual metaphor view,the biblical metaphors are generally classified into two categories: word sentence metaphor and metaphor in parables.According to Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor classification,the author try to combine the biblical metaphors with three types of metaphors—orientational metaphors,ontological metaphors and structural metaphors.Furthermore,by the contents of the Bible,metaphorical expressions in the Bible can also be classified into three general categories. |
PDF Full Text Request