A Cognitive Study Of Metaphor In Ancient Chinese Poetry

The study of metaphor can be traced back to over 2000 years ago. But traditionally, metaphor is commonly regarded as the decoration of language or one of the rhetorical devices employed to achieve expression effects in literary works. Since the 1930s, metaphor study has broken through the traditional restrictions and entered a multidisciplinary period since the 1970s. The most influential theory is the cognitive theory developed by Lakoff et al. According to these researchers, metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon; but more importantly, it is a pervasive thinking mode and a cognitive means of human beings (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 5).Metaphor is the life principle of poetry and poetry is closely related to metaphor. Previous scholars and researchers usually studied ancient Chinese poems from the perspective of literature, focusing especially on rhetoric and images. And few of them analyzed ancient Chinese poetry from the cognitive perspective. Up to now we can hardly find case studies involving cognitive analysis of ancient Chinese poetry. This dissertation attempts to apply the recent researches on metaphor study, based on an analysis of examples from ancient Chinese poems, to explore the application of metaphors in ancient Chinese poetry in a totally new perspective compared with traditional rhetorical approach. Image schema focuses on the rich images in people's mind while they are thinking, which, to some extent, accords naturally with the rich images in ancient Chinese poetry. However, instead of concrete images, image schema is an embodied structure that associates abstract relations with concrete images. By applying the theory of image schema in cognitive linguistics, the author tries to explore the cognitive relationship between image schema and ancient Chinese poetry as well as the function of image schema in ancient Chinese poetry. The underlying purpose is to test the feasibility and applicability of the image schema theory in ancient Chinese poetry analysis and appreciation.The dissertation consists of five parts including the introduction and conclusion.The introduction offers background to the study, the purposes and significance as well as the structure of the thesis.Chapter 1 briefly introduces and analyzes traditional and cognitive researches on ancient Chinese poetry and cognitive theories of metaphor.In Chapter 2, attention is focused on the relationship between metaphor and poetry. The definitions and four kinds of classification of metaphors are discussed in this chapter.Chapter 3 discusses the features of ancient Chinese poetry and image schema analysis of ancient Chinese poetry. Front-back schema, up-down schema, linear order schema and the mixed use of various image schemata are dealt with in details in this chapter.And the last part is the conclusion of the thesis.