A Multifaceted Research Of The Motherland Metaphor In The Modern Chinese Poetry

The cognitive studies of metaphor now go into different directions. Some scientists begin to explore the neural mechanisms of metaphor comprehension and production, some researchers focus on its logical computation, while some metaphor studies tend to be done in a social context based on various discourse stypes including the literature work which used to be mainly studied by rhetoricians and now is explored by cognitive linguists in a new perspective.Based on the current research of cognitive linguistics, this dissertation aims to make a profound analysis of the pervasive motherland metaphor in modern Chinese poetry multifacetedly and demonstrates the construction of the image of motherland during different historical periods as well as the changing process of the concept of motherland.This dissertation is composed of eight chapters. Chapter I is a brief introduction to research background, the significance of this research, source of corpus and research outline. Chapter Ⅱ presents the related studies on poetic metaphor and an introduction to critical metaphor analysis, in order to propose the methodology this dissertation is going to adopt and its reason. Chapter III describes comprehensively the motherland metaphors in modern Chinese poetry. Firstly, a syntactic analysis of the metaphors is made. Secondly, a diachronic analysis of the metaphors from the corpus is completed, including an etymological review of the word "motherland" in the ancient Chinese language and a discussion of the decline and transformation of this metaphor in modern Chinese poetry.The Chapters from number IV to VII analyze motherland metaphor cognitively, culturally and socially. Based on the application of the conceptual metaphor theory and the blending theory, chapter IV focuses on the discussion of the cognitive mechanism of the metaphorical expressions concluded in chapter III. Chapter V demonstrates the influence of the cultural model of the traditional Chinese mothers on the motherland metaphor and on Chinese people’s concept of motherland after clarifying the relationship between cultural model and conceptual metaphor. Chapter VI examines the histocical social context of the production of the motherland metaphor and its impact on the production of the discourse in Chinese. As a supplement to chapter VI, Chapter VII, is an empirical research which is based on a questionnaire survey of contemporary young people in China from age seven to age twenty-eight, aiming to present their concept of motherland. Chapter VIII is the conclusion to this dissertation including a summary of the innovative contributions it makes to the scholarship of cognitive linguistics and the questions it opens up for further explorations.