Metaphor As A Major Factor Of Semantic Change And Its Significance In Vocabulary Learning

In the course of the historical development of language, word meaning is liable to change. Words are the most flexible part in language and it is precisely their semantic aspect that responds most readily to every change in social life. It is well known that metaphor plays a very important part in the process of semantic change. The purpose of this study is to offer some implications of metaphor theory for English language teaching and learning, especially vocabulary learning, and tries to find whether learners can understand intangible, nonphysical and abstract objects in terms of tangible, physical and concrete objects through metaphor. To testify metaphor as a major factor in semantic change and its significance in vocabulary learning, this thesis has taken an overview on metaphor studies from rhetoric stage to cognitive stage, and then studied metaphor from different dimensions. Research shows that the essence of metaphor is to help understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another, metaphorical thinking which is closely related with semantic change is based on "similarities", "imagination" and "cross-domain mapping", and the importance of metaphorical transfer from the physical to mental mapping, metaphorical transfer from spatial mapping and metaphorical transfer in scientific field respectively. The study comes to a conclusion that metaphor is not only a phenomenon of language, but also an effective cognitive tool, which is helpful for a better understanding of polysemy, idiomatic expressions and cultural implications in vocabulary.