| Science and technology is closely related with the cognitive ability of human. As English words for science and technology (EST) is an important carrier of science and technology, it draws more and more attention from the linguistic field. The conceptual metaphor as an important theory of cognitive linguistics is used to analyze the essence of language in terms of cognition. The purpose of this thesis is to use the theory of conceptual metaphor to study EST so that we will find the essential reason of birth of EST and the features of EST. At the same time an analysis of the language that scientists and technologists use can help people appreciate the importance of embodied, directly physical experiences in the processes of thinking of scientists and technologists.Communication is the basis and important function of language. However, this feature of language is not its inherent feature, but is related with human cognition, that is to say, what kinds of meaning of a word expresses depends not only on the external factors but also on the subjective factors such as cognition and psychology which we form by experiencing the objective world. Therefore during the study of EST, some linguistits find that the source of the birth of EST is from the psychological imagination. And such imagination is conceptual metaphor. The conceptual metaphor was developed by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980. According to Lakoff and Johnson, conceptual metaphor can be thought of as mappings from a source domain of everyday experience to a target domain of abstract entities, with the aim of enlarging and enhancing understanding of that target domain. Therefore no matter what creating the name of new technical products or endowing scientific and technical words with a new meaning, it is the process of mapping, that is to say, using a known existing concept to comprehend a new unknown conceptThere are six parts in this thesis. The first part is the introduction. It simply introduces the studies of EST both in China and abroad and outlines the frame of the whole thesis. Generally speaking, there have already been a lot of metaphor researches in scientific and technological vocabulary in the west. But researches like this are insufficient in China, which is also the reason for the choice of this topic. Chapter one that is the second part gives a literature review of metaphor, which pays more attention on conceptual metaphor theory. EST, as a variety of languages, can be divided into three kinds: technical words, semi-technical words and non-technical words in terms of external structure of formation. And each one has its respective characteristics. So Chapter two is going to discuss these. By means of studying the formation of EST it proves that conceptual metaphor is the most important reason of birth of EST in terms of its external structure. The fourth part is Chapter three. This part is the key point of this thesis. It gives some reasons why we use conceptual metaphor to study the birth of EST. In this part we introduce mechanism of conceptual metaphor, that is to say, mapping between the source domain and the target domain on the basis of similarities. So that it proves the great power of conceptual metaphor in the birth of EST. The fourth chapter of the thesis discusses the functions of conceptual metaphor in EST. We will get five functions by means of conceptual metaphor. At the beginning of the conceptual metaphor used in EST, many words of scientific field have the feature of metaphorization. In order to prove further the effect of conceptual metaphor in EST, the author discusses the types and features of metaphorical EST in chapter five. The last part is the conclusion. In this part, it states the thesis' skeleton and the author's thought that scientists build the mapping relation of two things at different experiential worlds or conceptual worlds and create the vocabulary of science and technology on the basis of sameness or similarities between objects.
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