The Evaluative Functions Of Metaphor

The language of evaluation plays an essential role in the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relationship, and the Appraisal System, which deals with the language of evaluation, is a crucial part of interpersonal semantics, expressing speaker's viewpoint, attitude and stance. The research so far confines evaluative resource to specific words, without acknowledging the importance of metaphor. However, ever since the publication of Metaphors We Live By, the cognitive nature of metaphor has been acknowledged and the claim that our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical is gaining popularity. Departing from the claim that metaphor is basic to human experience, the present thesis studies the metaphorical construction of evaluative concepts under the appraisal framework. It establishes systems within which metaphors construct evaluative concepts.The evaluative functions of metaphor come from its nature. Metaphor is the interaction between two semantic domains, which provides people with the possibility of perceiving abstract things through concrete ones and express them vividly. The language of evaluation is perhaps the most complex of human communication since it involves the expression of various aspects of invisible human feeling, judgment and appreciation. With metaphor, the complex system of human attitude is conceptualized in terms of concrete physical objects, spatial orientations and other more clearly structured concepts. Different aspects of attitude are not only identified and referred to, but also given structures and quantified.Meanwhile, since metaphors are partially structured, people are able to highlight and hide certain qualities in evaluation. Partial structuring gives rise to what Goatly (1997: 259) calls "diversification", which means that a concept is understood in terms of a number of different metaphors. Diversification not only makes possible the comprehending of things from different angles, but also provides a theoretical basis for the expression of graduation.Based on the evaluative potentials of metaphor stated above, the thesis exceeds its exploration of the metaphorical construction of emotion, judgment, appreciation and their intensification on the one hand, and the construction of implied attitude and the imposition of ideology on the other. The author establishes a system which can organize the seemingly unsystematic metaphors and finds the pattern of the metaphorical construction of evaluative concepts, as metaphor theorists are trying to do about concepts like emotion and morality. For emotion concepts, most metaphors are organized within a five-stage scenario; for judgment and appreciation, they co-construct each other through the processes of dehumanization and personification; for the metaphorical construction of implied attitude, the resources of indirectness, entailment-presupposition relationship between conceptual metaphor and linguistic metaphor and partial structuring works together to realize the manipulation and imposition of ideology; for intensification, most metaphors are entailments of the master metaphor intensification is quantification. In this way, the system within which metaphor realize its evaluative functions is established.It is hoped that the research will shed light on both the research of appraisal within the realm of functional linguistics and the application of metaphor within the realm of cognitive linguistics.