A Cognitive Approach To Metaphors In Robert Frost's Poetry

Metaphor was traditionally considered as a figure of speech or a kind of ornamental language. However with the development of metaphor studies, it is no longer taken just as a rhetoric device in language but a figure of thought or a cognitive mechanism which helps readers to grasper implied meanings. Metaphors We Live By, a masterpiece by Lakoff and Johnson, marked the beginning of cognitive turn for metaphor studies. Lakoff and Johnson generalize the nature of metaphor as"the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning". They analyze the structure of metaphor in terms of mappings across conceptual domains, and they claim that such mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in everyday experience and knowledge.Cognitive approaches have broadened the scope of metaphor study. In 2002, Peter Stockwell published the book, Cognitive Poetics: an Introduction, which accelerates the development of cognitive stylistics. It focuses on the theory introduction. Later in 2003, another book, Cognitive Poetics in Practice, written by Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen, came out in companion with the first book in cognitive poetics by presenting cases studies in accordance to each of Stockwell's chapters. The two books created a new area where cognitive poetics forms and offer a systemic theory basis and new insights to appreciate poetry. In both books, metaphor plays a prominent role in literature interpretation. As a cognitive mechanism, metaphor provides cognitive methods for the successful interpretation of implicit meanings in poetry. Metaphor provides a mapping from one conceptual domain to another domain, that is to say, from the source domain to the target domain.Considering the poems of Robert Frost is"deceptive simple", and his poems are highly generalized as"begin in delight and end in wisdom", which partly attributes to the skillful use of metaphors, this thesis attempts to explain the role metaphor plays in the comprehension of Robert Frost's poems. In the thesis, three metaphor theories are explained with the background introduction of cognitive poetics. They are, Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory, Lakoff and Turner's poetic metaphor and Fauconnier and Turner's blending theory. Lakoff and Turner completely integrated poetic metaphor into the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor in More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. This thesis agrees with the above view. Thus the thesis adopted the conceptual metaphor and blending theory for cases studies.The thesis based on Robert Frost's poems, tries to explore the implicit meaning of the poems by adopting conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory. The main content or the main task of the thesis is to apply a theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory into the cognitive interpretation of Frost's poems. There are mainly three purposes for the study. The first purpose is to expose philosophical meanings of the poems which is underneath Frost's"deceptive simple"as his style. Secondly, it tries to testify that Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Blending Theory as a basic cognitive mechanism works as an effective, creative and indispensable cognitive device for poetry interpretation and meaning construction, which offers a new approach for poetry interpretation. Lastly, the thesis is an exemplification of cognitive poetics. It employs a novel-cognitive approach to analyzing poems that the approach will help to bridge the gap between linguistics analysis and literary appreciation.