A Metaphor Study On Chinese Time Nouns In Pre-Qin Dynasty

Metaphor theory is one of the most representative theories in the contemporary cognitive linguistics. In recent decades, it has become a hot topic of philosophy, anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics and literary criticism, etc. Metaphor in nature is the thinking mode of human beings. By introducing it into related disciplines, we can undoubtedly expand the vision and domain of our research. Of Chinese vocabulary, vocabulary about time is the most basic, typical, and important. The time concept it reflects is one of the concept systems that is most closely linked with the humanity. At present the research work to the time vocabulary in linguistics is mostly from aspects of grammar, semantics, and culture. Other aspects are rarely involved. This thesis plans to take cognitive linguistics as the research vision, selecting the time vocabulary as the research category and the time nouns in pre-Qin dynasty as the specific research object, trying to explore the metaphor modes, the metaphor occurrence patterns and the metaphor cultural functions of the time nouns in pre-Qin dynasty from the angle of the metaphor.This thesis is divided into six major parts altogether.The first part is the introduction, mainly introducing the research significance, the research present situation, the research approaches and the research materials.The second part firstly introduces the definition of time and two kinds of prototypes of the time concept of the humanity, generalizes the time vocabulary and gave a simple limit to the time nouns secondly, establishing the premise and the foundation for the following research.The third part mainly gives a detailed description of the time nouns in pre-Qin dynasty from the angle of vocabulary research, presents the clear appearance of the language materials through the quota statistic, the system classification and analysis of the constitution characteristics of the nouns.From the fourth part to the sixth part is the focus of the paper. It investigates themetaphor modes, the metaphor occurrence patterns and the metaphor cultural functions of the time nouns in pre-Qin dynasty, unfolding the rich metaphorical characteristics of the time nouns.