Influence Of Metaphor On The Change Of Lexical Meaning

Metaphor has been described as a central tool of our cognitive apparatus. It is central to our understanding of how language, thought and discourse are structured. Consequently the study of metaphor has been of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplines including linguistics, psychology, philosophy and literature, etc.. The role of metaphor in language has been a focus of considerable interest in linguistics and other fields since the pioneering work of Lakoff and Johnson who have published the famous book "Metaphors We Live By" in 1980.Since then, there are a lot of studies on metaphor from various aspects. However, The research focusing on the relationship between words and metaphor still remains vacant. That's the aspect this paper will explore from. It is through metaphorical concept in our minds that we create or shift different lexical meanings of words. The present paper probes into the role of metaphor from the view of lexical meaning, trying to explain some main issues about metaphor, giving us a view about how metaphor influences words and finding the use in the SLA field. The conclusion can be demonstrated as following:1. The words' shifting is not irregular. There are always some rules we can find.2. These rules are governed by the metaphorical concept in our minds.3. This metaphorical concept is very useful in our language teaching field.