A Cognitive Interpretation Of Metaphor

This thesis studies metaphor as a cognitive mechanism and explores its implication into language learning and concept understanding. The notion of conceptual metaphor, put forward by Lakoff and Johnson, is a metaphorical process of thinking which hides behind everyday language and structures our conceptual system. They believe that the essence of metaphor is to understand a relatively abstract concept in terms of a relatively concrete concept. There are plentiful conceptual metaphors unconsciously existing in our mind. Much of our conceptual system is metaphorical. Each conceptual metaphor heads and governs a system of linguistic metaphors and conceptual metaphors are systematically related to each other. The operational mechanism of metaphor is systematic mapping from the source domain to target domain. Mapping is not random, but based on our physical and cultural experience. Therefore, there will be possibility of the implication of conceptual metaphor in English language learning and concept understanding.So based on the study of the nature of conceptual metaphor, and the working mechanism of metaphor, we find that conceptual metaphor provides a reasonable interpretation of the uses of some English prepositions which are regarded as a big problem of English learning as well as helps us understand and learn metaphorical expressions pertaining to abstract concept. We exemplify two English interpretations"up"and"in"to prove our point. In metaphorical expression learning, we discover that if we make unconscious conceptual metaphors conscious in our mind which will help us build up the associations between the source domain and target domain, we can understand metaphorical expressions more easily and efficiently through examples of metaphorical expressions of Anger. Besides, conceptual metaphor plays an important role in abstract concept understanding and thus we may have new ideas of the abstract world. A lot of different conceptual metaphors of"love"and"time"systematically further our understanding of them.The conclusion is that conceptual metaphor is a new way to interpret some English prepositions, is helpful for metaphorical expressions pertaining to the abstract concept and is of benefit to abstract concept understanding.Cognitive linguistic study on metaphor has much influence on English learning and concept understanding in general. However, in terms of breadth and depth, this study is still limited. Further researches on conceptual metaphor also need to be done.