Metaphorical Sentences:A Contrastive Study In English And Chinese

This Ph. D dissertation, based on Zhang Jin's theory of prototype and model and the theory of cognitive linguistics, offers a contrastive study of metaphorical sentences in English and Chinese. It focuses on the generation and representation of metaphorical sentences in the two languages, of which some similarities and differences are found. This study is aimed at demonstrating that metaphorization, like combination, substitution and transformation, is also a kind of generative mechanism of sentences.Metaphor, as a very common phenomenon in language, is an important research topic that has drawn intellectual pursuit since remote antiquity. Particularly, it has been studied since the 1930's from different aspects in different disciplines, such as philosophy, logic, sociology, semiotics, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychology and pragmatics. Cognitive linguistics regards metaphor as a conceptual phenomenon, which is prevalent in our life, but it seems that few people have combined the study of metaphor with that of syntax. Only Halliday and his followers have put forward the novel notion of grammatical metaphor, which means that metaphor influences the lexicogrammatical choice so that metaphor is lexicogrammatical as well as lexical. This research, however, based on the study of earlier researchers, suggests that metaphorization be one of the generative mechanisms of sentences. Sentences generated through metaphorization are metaphorical sentences. Sentences generated directly from the reality are nonmetaphorical sentences. This study is complementary to the research of metaphor and grammar, so it is somewhat significant both theoretically and practically.This thesis falls into six chapters.Chapter One is the introduction, which discusses the theme, the theoretical background and the main aims of the paper. It also provides a working definition of themetaphorical sentence.According to Zhang Jin(张今,陈云清,1981；张今,1990；张今,1997), though there are an indefinite number of sentences in a language, there exist some basic sentence patterns, which are generated directly from reality. Other sentences are derived from the basic sentence patterns by combination, substitution and transformation. Zhang Jin's theory explains scientifically and systematically the relationship between a vast number of sentences, but it seems that it cannot explicate very convincingly the relationship between some other sentences. In order to make Zhang Jin's theory more comprehensive and more explicative, the author is so bold as to add to the original three generative mechanisms another one which is the metaphorical mechanism. The author assumes that metaphorization is one of the generative mechanisms of sentences. The metaphorical sentence is defined as a sentence in which the relationships between the verb on the one hand and the Subject, and/or the Object/Complement on the other are incongruent with or uncorresponding to reality. In other words, the relationship between the grammatical elements in a metaphorical sentence is incongruent with that between the corresponding entities in reality. The incongruent relationship includes the Subject-verb relationship, the verb-Object relationship and the Subject-verb-Object/Complement relationship.Chapter Two presents a study of the generative mechanisms of metaphorical sentences in English and Chinese.According to cognitive linguistics, metaphor is conceptual by nature. Conceptual metaphor, which means experiencing one thing in terms of another, leads to linguistic metaphor, of which the metaphorical sentence is one kind. Due to the same cognitive models and thinking modes of human beings, metaphorical sentences in English and Chinese are generated through the same mechanisms by mapping more concrete things onto more abstract things. Since concrete things can be further classified into humanbeings, animals, plants and objects, the generative mechanisms of metaphorical sentences are represented by personification, animalization, plantification, hypostat...