Motivation Of The Words And The Metaphor

As the developing of cognitive linguistic, discovering of the motivation in words has made a progress. But there is little research on the forming process and cognitive characteristic of metaphor words, which this paper aims to solve. This paper includes five chapters.Preface, it puts forward the question based on summarize of formal researching, and points out that metaphor words are the objects.The first chapter, we discuss the basing theory: a single morpheme is arbitrary while a morpheme structure is motivated. Which structure is choused is decided by many reasons. Metaphors can make concept as an important conceptual way, so it is an important motivation of words.The second chapter, we describe the cognitive structure of a metaphor as a combination of a source domain, a target domain, the particular characteristics and the common characteristic of the source and target domain. The cognitive structure can be projected to the language to form a free metaphor or a word metaphor. We definite these two forms. And metaphor words are formed in two ways: the source domain and target domain are put together to form an obvious form; a word is used as a metaphor to form a convert form.The third chapter, we compartmentalize the free form to five types basing on if we think the source and target domain are the same thing. Based on the definition in the second chapter and discussing of the five types, we can see that simile and metaphor are complete free forms; figureground and impersonate are in the middle step to be a convert word metaphor; a decorated structure is in the middle step to be an obvious word metaphor. And symbolization only represents as an article.The forth chapter, we discuss the obvious form. It can be divided into two forms: target/source form and source/target form. We describe the metaphor character of these forms and also forms in them. When obvious forms are used, we just use the metaphor as a usual meaning because of the one meaning level of it, while convert forms are used, we add a metaphor to it by finding a target form. The fifth chapter, we discuss the difference of thinking when people recognize the metaphor during the forming process of the convert form: at the beginning, the reader can make sure the word is used as a metaphor, and do not make sure if it is a metaphor in the middle of meaning generalization if there is no sign. Once the generalization is fulfilled, the metaphor will only be recognized after reflection. The recognition is impacted by the meaning structure of a word too.This paper discusses the two ways of the formation of a word metaphor and the different representation during the process, discusses the metaphor character and cognitive characteristic of word metaphor, and illuminates that if the motivation of words show a metaphor has an important impaction on metaphor using.