Self-negotiation In Metaphor Construction And Interpretation

1. IntroductionMetaphor that is pervasive in language, used to be treated as a stylistic figuration, a poetic embellishment or a deviation from ordinary usage, and sometimes even be considered something absurd or false as being in logical opposition to standard meaning. However, the past 25 years has witnessed a cognitive shift from the linguistic and logical traditions. It has led us to believe that metaphor bears relevance to human experience and reveals matters concerning the mind (and the body also). As Lakoff & Johnson (1980: 3) claim, metaphor is omnipresent in daily life, not just in language but also in thought and action. It affects the ways in which human beings perceive, think and act."Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature"(Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 3). Such a belief, hopefully, is able to provide a much more profound insight into the nature of human rationality. It is thus widely acknowledged that metaphor should be regarded as a process of thought rather than a piece of language. To put it another way, metaphor should be seen as a figure of the mind rather than a figure of speech. Therefore, the study of metaphor from the cognitive perspective is not just to set an academic trend, but to obtain a better understanding of how the human mind works when metaphor is constructed or interpreted. This dissertation, entitled"Cognitive self-negotiation in metaphor construction and interpretation", aims to examine the Conceptual Blending (hereafter CB) theory developed by Fauconnier and Turner(Fauconnier & Turner 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 2002;Fauconnier 1997, 1998, 2001),with its concentration upon the cognitive principle and mechanisms involved in the process of the subject's construction and interpretation of metaphors. It is not primarily concerned with metaphor itself. Actually, it deals with the psychological processes of metaphor construction and interpretation, the possibilities and limitations of human reasoning and the cognitive effects of mental mappings, instead.2. The background and contextThe study of how meaning is constructed and interpreted is not merely the concern of...