The Study Of Cohesive And Coherent Function Of Metaphor In Fortress Besieged

Metaphor has traditionally been viewed as one of the rhetorical devices and studied at lexical and syntactical level. The year 1980 witnesses a cognitive turn in metaphor study with the landmark publication of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson put forward the conceptual metaphor theory and claim that human thought processes are largely metaphorical and human conceptual system is largely metaphorically structured. Then it is reasonable to infer that metaphor plays an important role in conceptualizing human experience and thus linguistically it can help to organize a discourse. Some scholars have done research on the textual role of metaphor both abroad and at home, such as Goalty (1997, 2000), Cameron (2000, 2003), Liao Meizhen (1999) and Feng Xiaohu (2001). Although increasing attention has been paid to metaphor study at discourse level, there is a lack of analysis of textual function of metaphor with the conceptual metaphor theory in a specific discourse, especially in a literary discourse, which is a means through which we humans organize much of our experience. The Chinese novel Fortress Besieged (Chien, 2003), with high density of metaphors, can provide ample data for the present study and thus is chosen.In this paper, conceptual metaphor theory as well as discourse analysis has been applied to the exploration of the textual function of metaphor in Fortress Besieged. It seeks to find the ways in which metaphor accomplishes the cohesive and coherent role in Fortress Besieged. The analysis is carried out at two levels, both the linguistic level and the conceptual level, with the former dealing with metaphorical expressions and latter dealing with metaphorical concepts. Meanwhile, the analysis is made both among metaphors and within individual metaphors. In this research it has been found out that in Fortress Besieged metaphors on one hand can create cohesion either by lexical links between different parts of the metaphor (the tenor and the vehicle) or by the mapping patterns between the tenor and the vehicles; on the other hand metaphor can build coherence by overlapping entailments between the tenor and the vehicle or close relationship between different vehicles at conceptual level. Also, different vehicles focusing on various aspects of one concept can create coherence in the text. Moreover, the systematicity of conceptual metaphor can fundamentally contribute to textual coherence. In conclusion, the various ways provide evidence that metaphor plays an important role at discourse level, thus verifying the conceptual metaphor theory and at the same time enriching the discourse analysis.