A Brief Analysis On Organism Metaphor In English Business Articles

This thesis aims to help Chinese English learners to have a better understanding of OrganismMetaphor in English business articles. The author analyzes Organism Metaphor from two aspects:understanding it as a fundamental conceptual metaphor and understanding it with RelevanceTheory.The notion of conceptual metaphor is put forward by cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson intheir epoch-making co-work Metaphors We Live By (1980). Unlike the traditional views whichhold that metaphor is a rhetorical device and its function is mainly ornamental and secondary,they claim in their book that metaphor is not just a matter of language (a figure of speech) but amatter of thought functioning as a fundamental cognitive tool to help human express abstractideas through concrete ones. Thus, they make a distinction between conceptual metaphor andlinguistic metaphor. Conceptual metaphors are part of our deep and unconscious everydayconceptual system, while linguistic metaphors are the surface manifestation or realization ofconceptual metaphors. From the perspective of conceptual metaphor, the author introduces theorigins, entailments and the sub-levels of Organism Metaphor.According to Relevance Theory, the process of utterance comprehension is an inferential processof establishing the relevance and searching for the optimal relevance. When communicating, thecommunicator produces an ostensive stimulus in his utterance which is relevant enough to beworth the audience's attention;the audience, on receiving the stimulus, tries to establish therelevance by resorting to his own cognitive environments. If the audience can get the contextualeffects of the communicator's utterance with the smallest processing efforts, then a level ofoptimal relevance is achieved. This utterance comprehension process lays a solid foundation forthe author's analysis on Organism Metaphor with Relevance Theory in this thesis.