Conceptual Metaphor And Discourse Organization

Metaphor plays an extremely important role in our lives. Not only our daily talking and writing, but also our conceptualization and categorization are directed by metaphorical thinking. Since Aristotle, there has been a vast amount of theoretical discussion on metaphor from various perspectives. Traditionally, metaphor has been viewed only as linguistic phenomena and studied as a rhetorical device. However, metaphor, being pervasive in our daily life, bears more layers of meaning. Now it is commonly accepted that conceptual metaphor is cognitive in nature and acts as our basic way of thinking. In the past few decades since 1970s, metaphor has become a focus of multi-disciplinary studies:linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and education science. Cognitive linguistics makes its contribution to metaphor study and has broadened its scopes. In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson published their famous book Metaphors We Live By, which brought metaphor study into a new epoch, triggering its cognitive revolution. They pointed out that metaphor is not only a figure of speech but also a conceptualized system and a manner of thought. Cognitive linguistics argues that metaphor constitutes basic schemas by which people conceptualize their experiences about the external world. Metaphor is, in essence, mapping from the source domain to the target domain, that is, from the familiar and concrete to the unfamiliar and abstract. When this happens, the entailments of metaphors as well as the contextual information will be integrated into texts and hence form coherent texts. Thus, it is accessible for us to explore discourse organization from the point view of conceptual metaphor. The theoretical focus in the interpretation of metaphor has been shifted from its rhetorical convention to the disciplines of language and cognition. As one of the most important proposition in contemporary cognitive linguistics and functional linguistics, the theory of metaphor plays an important role in the analysis of linguistic phenomena at lexical and grammatical level. However, a systematic study of metaphor in the context of discourse has not yet taken shape in its own right. Therefore, the present study is directed toward a comprehensive interpretation of how metaphors perform functions in the creation of discourse coherence and points out that metaphor is also a key mechanism for textuality.The cognitive conceptual metaphor theory serves as our theoretical framework and we explore its textual functions from the perspective of how and in what aspects conceptual metaphor contributes to text organization through sample analysis, The Book of Tao and Teh. After a brief introduction to some basic issues concerning textual cohesion and coherence, we have a detailed description of conceptual metaphor: its definition, working mechanism and philosophical basis. Governed by metaphors, metaphorical expressions are used systematically in groups and interacting with each other. Entailments of conceptual metaphors form a cohesive and linear link throughout a discourse. Under this cohesive network of metaphorical expressions, there is the underlying coherent system of conceptual metaphors, associated with the topic and its development in the discourse. Its systematicity and mapping between conceptual domains endow metaphors with coherent functions. We finally come to the conclusion that conceptual metaphors facilitate discourse organization.