Study Of Nominal Body Metaphor From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

For quite a long time, metaphor is taken as a rhetoric tool which is applied only to achieve some kind of special effect. It is not until the publishing of the book Metaphor: We Live By, by Lakoff & Johnson that we have a fresh idea on metaphor. According to the modern cognitive linguistics, metaphor is not only a phenomenon in language but also a cognitive activity understanding experiences in one domain with experiences in another domain. In human beings'lives, metaphor is omnipresent. Lakoff & Johnson pointed that metaphor has been penetrated not only to the language but also to our thinking and actions in daily life. In other words, our thinking and actions are all metaphorical. As a result, metaphor is an important tool for us to know about and understand the world.In the primitive time, due to the limitation on cogitation, the primitives relied on their body, to which they are most familiar, in order to recognize and understand the outside world. They accounted on their body and experiences with body as a measurement to know about entities in the outside world. For there were little words which can express the abstract meanings, it was inevitable that words for body is used to describe experiences with the outside world. Hence, the body metaphor emerges.In this thesis, under the framework of cognitive linguistics, the body metaphor in English, especially nouns, is discussed in detail using theories about conceptual metaphor, image schema and mapping and how human beings understand the world using the body experiences is further explained. Therefore, the whole thesis is constituted by six chapters. In Chapter One background, purpose and methodology of the study is introduced. Chapter Two is the literature review, in which the development of traditional view on metaphor is briefly introduced and in the following we mainly discuss the cognitive view on metaphor and dwell on two important concepts in the study, conceptual metaphor and image schema, which are also the theoretical foundation for the analysis later. And in Chapter Three we focused on theories about body metaphor, including foundation for body metaphor, and types of body metaphor, etc. In Chapter Four and Five, the core of the thesis, a systematic study on nominal body metaphor in English is conducted. We have discussed their experiential foundation and metaphorical expressions in detail. Then based on the three different standards we give a further classification to the body metaphors we have discussed before. The three standards are: metaphors based on similarity, metaphor based on image schema and metaphor based on mapping. And the last part, Chapter Six is the conclusion of the thesis. The author thinks that the foundation for the body metaphors is the body experiences, which once mapped to other domains creating the body metaphors discussed in this thesis. Study of body metaphor in terms of cognitive aspect can greatly facilitate our understanding about the meaning of body metaphor.