Metaphor And Its Cohesive And Dynamic Functions In Discourse

People's interest in the exploration of metaphor started with Aristotle and large amount of research can be found everywhere. To many researchers nowadays, metaphor is no longer just a matter of language, but there exists a deep and important relationship between metaphor and cognition. Metaphor is conceived as one of the chief cognitive structures by which we understand the unknown and abstract through the known or concrete. It plays an important role in our understanding of language and the world we describe through language.And in recent years, various types of research methodology have been employed in the studies of metaphor. Thus metaphor has been systematically explored from many perspectives. However, most of the studies seem to be static in nature, mainly concerning about metaphors at word or sentence level. With regard to the cohesive and dynamic functions of metaphor at discourse level, extensive and systematic studies are very rare. Therefore, the present work will mainly focus its attention on this aspect.The main content of the paper runs as follows. Part One is concerned with the rationale of the paper and a brief literature review on the development of research on metaphor. Part Two summarizes the nature of metaphor briefly. Part Three discusses some of the functions metaphor performs, based on the research by other investigators, as well as the current study of this paper on the role of metaphor in discourse. Part Four deals with the main concepts related to the cohesive and dynamic functions of metaphor in discourse. Part Five analyzes some samples to demonstrate how metaphor functions cohesively and dynamically in discourse. Part Six offers the conclusion of the study.