The Metaphorical Influence On The Extension Of The Meaning Of Weather Vocabulary

Since the famous originators Lakoff and Johnson published their far-reachingly influential work Metaphors We Live By, the "metaphor storm" has arisen in the linguistic world, and there have been a large number of researches emerging quickly. Metaphor has been considered as an important cognitive tool, which plays an immeasurable role on the people's creation and comprehension of thinking and language.Vocabulary is the mirror of the social development. In the fast development of physical world, the lexical meaning is extended at the same time in order to satisfy the people's constant demands. The result of the extension of the lexical meaning is polysemous phenomenon. As a significant and pervasive semantic phenomenon across languages, polysemy has attracted much attention of linguists to do a lot of researches. However, when many people study the relationship of different meanings of a polysemous word, they are confined to the internal structure of language without taking account of the underlying working mechanism, which leads to insufficient explanation of this phenomenon. With the emergence of cognitive linguistics, especially, metaphor provides us a powerful instrument to analyze this phenomenon better, and thereby to explicate the metaphorical influence on the extension of the lexical meaning fully and completely.The essence of metaphor is the basis of the extension of the lexical meaning, and it is certain that metaphorical thinking is closely related to extending the lexical meaning. Recently, there are many studies on metaphor from various aspects, but the researches focusing on the metaphorical influences on the extension of the lexical meaning still remain few. Especially, the researches on the metaphorical extension of lexical meaning about weather conditions are fewer. This thesis will attempt to probe into the influence of metaphor from the point of the extension of lexical meaning in detail, and to try my best to explain the working mechanism of metaphor in the process of extending the meaning about weather vocabulary.