A Cognitive Study On Metaphor Clusters In Modern Chinese

The research on Metaphor Cluster has witnessed itself as an emerging area in metaphor study, providing not only a feasible entry point into the interface study on linguistic system, conceptual system and language use but also an opportunity for the development of CMT theory. This paper, within the theoretical framework of Access Semantics, taking metaphor clusters containing life metaphor as case study, conducted a corpus-based study of around 1,980,000 characters from the articles published by DuZhe magazine in the year of 2012, supported by which a qualitative and quantitative analysis on metaphor clusters was therefore performed.Major statistic findings of this research are as such:the wide existence of metaphor clusters in metaphorical language in modern Chinese is confirmed by the fact that metaphor clusters occupy 87.7% and 83.8% of all the metaphorical language in the two stages of corpus study respectively; mixed metaphor ranks itself as the most frequent type of metaphor clusters; by observing the conceptual distribution network of the source domains and the types of cross-domain mappings between the source and target domains, conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy distinguish themselves as the cognitive motivation at the backstage conceptual level accounting for the production of metaphor clusters in natural language; metonymic language widely exist in metaphor clusters.Supported by empirical data, this study further proposed a modified definition for metaphor cluster and articulately defined the core issue concerning segmentation criteria for metaphor clusters which has long been avoided or ignored, yet the significance of which recently attract the attention of researchers. The nature of metaphor being emergent, probabilistic and local was examined; its structural characteristics, taxonomy and cognitive functions are discussed. From the perspective of frontstage cognition and backstage cognition, the emergence of metaphor clusters is viewed as a cognitive production process from backstage conceptual system to frontstage linguistic system with the two backstage cognitive mechanisms, namely conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy, considered as the conceptual cognitive motivation for the emergence of metaphor clusters in natural language. From the perspective of cognitive access, the semantic coherence mechanism of mixed metaphor clusters is addressed by elaborating how clash between cognitive models at the level of source domain and target domain are resolved. From the perspective of selection and fusion, the complete semantic composition process of metaphor clusters has been therefore systematically constructed.