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The Cohesive Role Of Conceptual Metaphor In English News Reports

Posted on:2007-12-16Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L Y ChenFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360185950800Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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Cohesion has originally been considered as a grammatical device signalled by morphosyntatic cues. These are usually identified as reference, ellipsis and substitution, conjunction and word order, etc. Recently, discourse scholars have suggested the need to study the role of cognition in discourse organization, and have affirmed that it is advisable to demonstrate how text representations are related to deeper conceptual representations. Since conceptual metaphor has claimed that human thought processes are largely metaphorical and human conceptual system is largely metaphorically structured and defined, it is safe to infer that metaphor has a central role in the interpretation and expression of human experience, thus from a linguistic point of view, it could be hypothesized to be a cohesive force in discourse.In this paper, Lakoff & Johnson's theory of conceptual metaphor has been applied to the explanation of the cohesion in news discourse. Starting from the observation that metaphors as well as the metaphorical expressions originated from them tend to be organized systematically, the question is raised in what way those metaphors and expressions cooperate to meet the cohesive role in a text. The empirical part of the article consists of the sample analysis of three political news reports. This analysis is carried out at two levels, both the cohesion among metaphors and the cohesion within individual metaphors. The paper closes by summarizing the main insight along the sample analysis in the light of the conceptual metaphor theory, pinpoints its possible contribution to the linguistic research of metaphor and its limitation.
Keywords/Search Tags:conceptual metaphor, cohesion, discourse
PDF Full Text Request
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