A Study Of The Metaphorical Collocations Of See

The English word see has other collocations apart from its original meaning of visual perception or faculty of sight such as I see what you mean, She is seeing an older man. The meanings of see in these collocations are no longer in the domain of physical perception, but mapped onto some other abstract domains. People often turn a blind eye to the metaphoricity of these conventional collocations, as they are a part of everyday language. This thesis intends to arouse people's awareness of the metaphorical collocations of see and the conceptual metaphors underlying these expressions.Known as Father of Collocation Study, Firth formally introduces the concept of collocation into linguistic study. His theory of collocation has a far-reaching influence on the study of many other linguists. In his frequently quoted statement "You know a word by the company it keeps" (Firth 1968a: 179), Firth points out that the concept of meaning by collocation allows for the polysemous nature of words, which are disambiguated through the process of collocation. Based on Firth's collocation theory, the author of this thesis first identifies the different meanings of see by examining the company it keeps, then designs a series of tests to distinguish the metaphorical collocations of see from the literal ones.Conceptual metaphor theory put forward by Lakoff and Johnson in their landmark work Metaphors We Live By (1980) is used to analyze these metaphorical collocations, and find out the underlying conceptual metaphors and their features. From this analysis, it is clear that metaphorical extension is a major motivation of polysemy. The arbitrariness claimed by structuralism exists between word form and word meaning, while the relationship between the original and extended meanings of a polysemous word is motivated. The fact that see whose original meaning is physical perception is used to express other abstract meanings not only proves that metaphor is based on bodily experience, but also shows that metaphor is an important cognitive tool which enables human beings to conceptualize and talk about abstract or unfamiliar concepts by using concrete or familiar ones.