Pedagogical Implication Of Body-part Metaphors

Metaphor is not only a single means for language rhetoric, but also an omnipresent way of thinking and cognitive approach of the hanuman. In daily life, metaphors of body-parts are realized through mappings. The cognitive law that man cognizes things from the near to the far, from entity to non-entity, from the simple to the complex, and from the concrete to the abstract, determines the basic role of body-parts in cognizing the world. So, hanuman regard their own body as the starting point to know other things, and obtain experience from one's own body and interaction with the external world, in order to understand and weigh things. Metaphor, as an important way of word meaning change, a bridge between cognition and language, plays a role in vocabulary learning.Based on Lakoff & Johnson's theories on metaphors, this thesis investigates the similarities and differences between English and Chinese body-part metaphors from the cognitive perspective and explores the causes from both cognitive and cultural aspects. After combining the cognitive mechanism of body-part metaphors with English vocabulary learning, we can get a conclusion that it can make vocabulary teaching more suitable to human's cognition and the pedagogical implication is significant to both teacher's teaching quality and students'learning efficiency.