Metaphor Systematicity And Its Contribution To Textual Coherence

The importance and ubiquity of metaphor in human language and thought have long been recognized and since Aristotle there has been a vast amount of theoretical discussion on metaphor from various perspectives. Traditionally, metaphor has been viewed as a pure linguistic phenomenon and studied as a rhetoric device. In the past few decades since 1970s, metaphor has become the focus of multi-discipline studies: linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and education science. The publication in 1980 of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphor We Live by marked the beginning of the contemporary theory of metaphor (CTM) and a cognitive approach was thereby introduced to metaphor study. Metaphor referred to in the contemporary theory and here in this thesis should be understood as conceptual metaphor, as opposed to linguistic metaphor.Within the cognitive framework, metaphor studies have been successfully done concerning its nature, structure, and properties. However, there is a significant lack of attention paid to the textual function metaphor can realize, namely its role in organizing a text into a coherent unit. The present study therefore aims to apply insights from the contemporary theory of metaphor to the analysis of its textual function, namely, to explore metaphor systematicity and its role in realizing coherence in a text.In the study of textual coherence, there is little agreement among scholars on a comprehensive definition of coherence. However, in the thesis a...