Analysis Of Literature Discourse Coherence-Based On Conceptual Metaphor

Metaphor is a time-honored topic since the ancient time. With the influence of cognitive science emerging from the 1980s, people's recognition for metaphor rises to a record-high level. According to the contemporary cognitive linguists, metaphor which is in-between reality and language, is the integral part of human cognition and pervasive way of thinking. The essence of metaphor is to understand one thing in terms of another (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 5). Conceptual metaphor located in our minds is an effective way to help us interact with the world, acquire knowledge, and instruct us to produce linguistic expressions. Therefore, metaphor is not just a linguistic phenomenon but in nature a tool to understand and conceptualize the world around us.However, up to now, much research on metaphor is just limited in word, sentence level and the attention in the large level---discourse level is not enough, let alone the specialized study on literature discourse. This thesis is expected to explore discourse function of conceptual metaphors in literature discourse. As it is well known to us, literature discourse, especially poetry and essays are full of metaphorical expressions. However, those expressions are often considered as one way of decoration of language, but seldom thought of as one basic thinking approach which can be used to instruct human beings to produce coherent linguistic expressions. Definitely to say, conceptual metaphors are in a very important position in literature discourse but for a long time, not much attention is paid to those conceptual metaphors, which to some certain degree, makes this thesis become more practicable and necessary. This thesis holds: conceptual metaphor is one of the important means of defining deep level of discourse coherence through systematicity.This thesis will start from the discussion in metaphor's nature, experiential ground and its intra-systematicity and inter-systematicity (including entailments, highlighting and hiding), which altogether will constitute the theoretical foundation of the study. The intra-systematicity of metaphor provides an integral structure and a frame of discourse informational flow, which makes metaphor itself coherent; while the inter-systematicity among different concepts including the hierarchical entailments, the parallel entailments and the evaluative entailments construct the coherence among different conceptual metaphors. Finally, coherent metaphors can help to contribute to the coherence of discourse since discourse often extends around such conceptual metaphors.