A Metaphor Approach To Discourse Coherence A Case Study: Fortress Besieged

The theoretical interest in the interpretation of metaphor has been shifted from rhetorical convention to the disciplines of language and cognition. As one of the most important propositions in contemporary cognitive linguistics and functional linguistics, the theory of metaphor plays an important role in the analysis of linguistic phenomena at lexical and grammatical levels. However, a systematic study of metaphor in the context of discourse has not yet been shaped in its own right.The author made research on textual function of metaphor framed by conceptual integration theory in combination with discoveries of discourse analysis and explored how metaphor contributes to discourse coherence through two working mechanisms (mapping & blending). The Chinese novel Fortress Besieged with high density and wide variety of metaphors provide ample data for the present study. Major findings are achieved in which metaphor accomplishes the coherent role in Fortress besieged. Firstly, in the cognitive sense, coherence largely results from interpreting one concept in terms of another activated by particular linguistic items by way of cross-domain mapping. It should be noted that mapping in discourse is by no means distributed in a clutter because different domains are mapped in particular manners such as direct"matching"between SD and TD, metaphor"derivation", and"entailment"evoked by one or more metaphors. Secondly, a coherent metaphoric text is also the product of conceptual"blending"between different concepts. In other words,"a composite space"is acquired in discourse on the basis of some cognitive manipulations such as"selection","abstraction"and"fusion"across domains. This blended space is regarded as a"schematized"whole, and therefore it can be further developed in discourse according to its own logic. Thirdly, the analysis of metaphor is by no means free of the constraints in cognitive context made by"encyclopedic knowledge"and"socio-cultural pattern."In this thesis, metaphor as one of the key points in cognitive linguistics is now in combination with the study of discourse coherence largely evoked by functional linguistics. In a sense, it is an attempt to explore complementary study of cognitive linguistics and functional linguistics. As metaphor can help to organize a text but meanwhile it can give readers the vividness and freshness, this thesis provides further evidence from the cognitive view of metaphor in literary discourse since Lakoff and Johnson's examples mostly come from daily expressions.