A Study On Conceptual Metaphor In Friends From The Perspective Of Discourse Analysis

Metaphor was traditionally viewed as a set of extraordinary figurative expressions and the study on it was confined mostly to literature and rhetoric. Recently with the development of cognitive linguistics, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) put forward the cognitive approach to the study of metaphor in their book Metaphors We Live By and they argue that metaphor can constitute basic schemas by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world. The way people conceptualize what they know about the world is metaphorical. Since then, metaphor is no longer taken just as a matter of language but a kind of thought. Metaphor, in cognitive linguistic study, is mainly conceptual metaphor. So far, previous research on metaphor has been successfully done at its rhetorical, lexical and syntactical levels in a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary way, but few at the discourse level. It is believed that the use of conceptual metaphor contributes to the coherence of a discourse and makes the discourse more vivid and understandable. Based on this analysis, the thesis discusses how conceptual metaphor constructs the coherence of a discourse and explores the discourse function of conceptual metaphor.Many researches on metaphor have been done at home and abroad, but most of them put emphases on the exploration of metaphor on the written discourse like literature and scientific text. As for the spoken discourse like Friends, few studies are on conceptual metaphor from the perspective of discourse analysis. Based upon the above analysis, the thesis discusses how conceptual metaphor acts in the spoken discourse Friends. A quality analysis will be undertaken to the use of metaphorical expressions in the five episodes sampled in"Friends", aiming at exploring how conceptual metaphor helps to better understand meaning behind the line and make the discourse more vivid and coherent.This thesis consists of five parts. Part one is the introduction. It firstly presents the theoretical basis, the objective and the organization of the thesis and the significance of the research, and then reviews the previous researches on metaphor interpretation in the tradition of rhetorical and cognitive approaches. With the research on the random sampling of five episodes in a popular American sitcom TV show Friends, the spoken discourse of specific genres,the thesis proposes the research questions. Part two gives the traditional view of metaphor and goes to the study of metaphor in cognitive linguistics. And then the definition, the physical grounding, the classification and the functions of conceptual metaphor are elaborated. It specifies the functions of conceptual metaphor and points out that conceptual metaphor has cohesive and coherent functions in discourse. Part three firstly tells the definition of spoken discourse, and then analyzes the relationship between discourse and conceptual metaphor, pointing out the important role the conceptual metaphor makes in the comprehension of a discourse. Part four analyzes all metaphorical expressions in the five randomly sampled episodes in Friends to show how conceptual metaphor performs discourse function in it. Pat five presents a conclusion of the previous parts and points out the limitations of the present study and offers some suggestions for future study.