Optimal Relevance-the Ultimate Goal Of Conceptual Metaphor Understanding

Metaphor is not only a category of poetics and literature in traditional meaning, but relates to philosophy, linguistics, psychology and many other fields. It makes metaphor study more complicated. American contemporary cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson put forward conceptual metaphor, which sets off another climax of metaphor study. As one of the fundamental theories in pragmatics, Relevance Theory reveals language communicative rules to gain linguistic knowledge through inference.In communication, the hearer receives the information which the speaker sends, and he will infer the information which he has received to understand the speaker's intended interpretation at last. Conceptual metaphor is a kind of implicit communication, as a weak implicature, and this makes understanding conceptual metaphor difficult. We think that it is an effective way of understanding conceptual metaphor correctly to connect metaphor with Relevance Theory. To metaphorical utterance, the hearer follows the rules of ostensive communication and optimal relevance, constructs context, and achieves the balance between cognitive effects and processing efforts. At the same time, the individual difference of the hearer affects the understanding degree of optimal relevance.