Study On Textual Coherent Function Of Conceptual Metaphor

Conceptual Metaphor Theory advanced by George Lakoff makes breakthrough in traditional study of metaphor. He brings metaphor study into cognitive field by claiming that metaphor is a way of thinking and cognition. However, study of conceptual metaphor mainly limited to lexical, phrasal and sentential levels. With the development of conceptual metaphor study, some scholars have dealt with conceptual metaphor at the textual level and discovered that conceptual metaphor can influence textual coherence. Text is an entity which entails conceptual and textual layers. Carried out either at the textual level or the conceptual level, previous researches on conceptual metaphor in texts fail to provide satisfactory answers to how conceptual metaphor constructs texts and in what aspects conceptual metaphor contributes to textual coherence.By integrating conceptual metaphor theory with cognitive approach to coherence, this thesis studies textual coherent function of conceptual metaphor. The empirical part of this thesis is composed of three different types of texts realized by conceptual metaphor, including a prose, a poem and a conversation. Through empirical analysis, the paper arrives at some conclusions that cross-domain mapping of conceptual metaphor governs text information and constructs overall text frame, that textual cohesion is realized by metaphorical expressions, especially lexical cohesion and that metaphorical meaning is synthesized to realize topics of texts.