On Comprehension Of Metaphor From The Perspective Of Culture

Metaphor becomes a hot topic in language researching for the past twenty years. People study metaphor from the perspectives of cognitive science, linguistics, psycholinguistics. Studying metaphor is to understand it properly. Scholars try to interpret metaphors in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, cognition and so on. But most of them ignore the role of culture in metaphor comprehension. This paper aims to explain how culture affects the comprehension of metaphor.There are five parts in this paper. Part one introduces the purpose of this thesis. Part two defines the terms of metaphor and culture and talks about the relationship between the metaphor and culture: metaphor constitutes culture models and metaphor is a tool to understand the cultural world. Part three gives the brief introduction of theories of metaphor comprehension from the aspects of comparison, semantics interaction, pragmatics and cognition and discusses the advantages and shortcomings of these theories. Part four is the main part. It illustrates how to understand some metaphors culturally from three aspects-techno-economic system, social system and ideational system by analyzing a lot of examples. Part five is the conclusion.Although some theories can interpret metaphor, they are not complete without considering the factors of culture. Metaphors are everywhere in our everyday life and interact with culture. Metaphors form on the basis of sharedculture backgrounds. It convinces that some metaphors should be understood from the perspective of culture, otherwise they do not work. When communicating with foreign people, we need to know the culture background of the target language better. However, the culture is also not a complete answer to interpreting metaphor, though it is very useful and plays an important role in metaphor comprehension. When we interpret a metaphor we must employ all effective theories not only the tool of culture.