Conceptual Metaphors In Tao Yuanming's Poetry

According to Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory, metaphor is a basic way of human cognitive mechanism and metaphor is"cross-domain mapping between a concrete domain and an abstract domain". It is systematic, generative and generalized, etc.In this essay, the author plans to analyze the Conceptual Metaphors in Tao Yuanming's Poetry. Through this research, the author aims to find (1) what conceptual metaphors are there in Tao Yuanming's Poetry?(2) How have the conceptual metaphors in Tao Yuanming's poetry come into being? (3) Do all those conceptual metaphors support Lakoff's major claims stated in the conceptual metaphor theory? At the same time the author will try to explain all these phenomena.The methodology adopted in this thesis for data collection is the five-step procedure for metaphor identification proposed by Steen (2002).Tao Yuanming's Poetry can be classified into four topics, they are: life, in or out of the officialdom, countryside and drinking. The author finds that there are conceptual metaphors in Tao Yuanming's Poetry, which reveal the topics of Tao Yuanming's Poetry (e.g. Human and nature are a unity. Lifetime is a day. Time is movement. Pastry is a home. Lifetime is a year. Death is sleep. Death is a departure. Life is a journey.Officialdom is a binding thing. Wine is medicine. Wine is truth. Fame is substance. Feeling is substance.).There are also some religion metaphors (The religion is the reality.) and legend metaphors (The legend is the reality).These conceptual metaphors come from human's experiential life and the cultural background of Chinese ancient society.This research, which is based on the data of 121 poems of Tao Yuanming, provides multicultural and multilingual evidences to enrich and verify the conceptual metaphor theory, at the same time, the author describes the metaphor features of Tao Yuanming's Poetry.