Orientational Metaphor Of UP

The earliest study of metaphor can date back to Aristotle's time. In his eyes, the use of metaphor was a departure from normal language; the ability to use and interpret metaphor derived from one's intuition. Aristotle's comments on metaphor exerted a great influence on the study in this field for centuries. Since then metaphor was treated for long as a scope of rhetoric, a matter of words rather than thought or action. Most studies of metaphor were within stylists and rhetoricians' interest.The classical view of metaphor continued until it was challenged by Richards in the 1930's, who brought metaphor study into the semantic s orientation. Metaphor was now regarded not as a deviation from language but as part of language. Metaphorical effects arose from semantic interaction of literal meaning and metaphorical meaning of a word. Richards' view was accepted by Black, who elaborated Richards' thoughts into Interaction Theory, arguing that the semantic treatment of metaphor proceeded from the recognition of the sentence as the primary unit of meaning. Later Halliday developed grammatical metaphor theory and put the study of metaphor within his framework of Functional Grammar. At this stage, metaphor study was totally a grammatical issue.George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's celebrated work, Metaphors We Live By (1980) greatly changes our thinking of metaphor. Metaphor is now in principle a conceptual issue. Many linguistic evidences suggest that metaphorical thinking arises from our embodied experiences in the world, reflecting the general regularity of cognitive process: our cognitive stage moves from the known to the unknown, from the abstract to the concrete. At every stage of cognition the acquired knowledge again serves as a starting point to gain the new knowledge. Human thought is thus a metaphorical process. Metaphorical use of language derives from our metaphorical concept system. Metaphor, in essence, is comprehending and experiencing one kind of things in terms of another. A cognitive approach to metaphor study thus has thrived.One scope of conceptual metaphor study is orientational metaphor. Orientational metaphor (also termed as spatialization metaphor) is defined by Lakoff and Johnson as metaphor that 'gives a concept a spatial orientation' (1980, 14). The study of orientational metaphor traditionally chooses prepositions of locality as its main target. One reason for that is cognitivists' effort to bring the concept of image schemas to the interpretation of the meaning extension of prepositions. Image schemas are assumed as a more primitive level of cognitive structures underlying metaphor and which provide a link between bodily experience and higher cognitive domains such as language (Saeed, 1997: 308). Metaphor organizes concepts by giving them a spatial orientation.Previous researches of orientational metaphor were carried out on the basis of semantic investigation of prepositions. However, they did not make a clear investigation concerning such questions as: First, in what dimensions do non-spatial conceptual metaphors extend? Second in what way spatial concepts are mapped onto the other non-spatial domains of concept?These questions constitute the research questions of this thesis. The study focuses on metaphorical extensions of the locative UP. All the data are randomly collected through BNC (British National Corpus). Langacker's TR-LM paradigm is applied to classify metaphorical extension of UP. If the use of UP is within the vertical space axis, then it retains its originally spatial sense, therefore a case of non-metaphorical extension. Otherwise, we regard it as a case of metaphor. Of all 350 sentences, 254 are analyzed for metaphorical extensions in this study. The study shows vertical spatial concept of UP can be mainly mapped onto five non-spatial concepts ranging from status, quantity, power, emotion and sensation, to time, and one horizontal concept.The thesis concludes that there exists a systematic mapping from spatial concept of UP to non-spatial concepts. The study has verified...