A Study On Lexical Metaphors In Ehe

Research on metaphor which has been regarded as a rhetoric phenomenon dates back to Aristotle and enjoys a long history. But with the development of multidisciplinary research, cognitive concept was introduced to the research of metaphor. Linguists Lakoff and Johnson develop the conceptual metaphor theory in Metaphors We Live By, where metaphor is taken as the process of meaning mapping from the source domain to the target domain. Now metaphor is no longer regarded as a mere rhetorical phenomenon, but also a cognitive mechanism of human thought. According to the statistics, 70% of the lexical meanings originate from metaphor in language (Zhao, 2001). Metaphors which are employed to verify the cognitive function are mainly taken from literary works, which ignores the role that the metaphorization in scientific and technological discourses plays. So the traditional approach that regards metaphor as a figure of speech inapplicable in scientific and technological discourses has lost its theoretical foundation. And this encourages us to research into the mystery of lexical metaphors in English of hydraulic engineering, abbreviated as EHE.Metaphors can be divided into two levels, i.e. lexical metaphor and grammar metaphor. But due to the limitation of time and resources, this thesis tries only to focus on the study of lexical metaphors in EHE from a conceptual metaphorical point of view. Metaphor is an indispensable element and thinking mode in EHE discourse. Thanks to different features of metaphors in EHE, hydraulic researchers and engineers create various models to account for diverse phenomena in all hydraulic fields concerned. The study demonstrates that the improved model can sufficiently interpret the metaphors in EHE. Case study shows that the interpretative model of metaphor can ideally interpret most of metaphors in EHE, but surely there are still some metaphors which cannot be explained satisfactorily. Analysis shows that EHE metaphors share common features with those in other fields, and that the source domains of EHE metaphors are principally limited to four fields, i.e. biology, civil engineering, agriculture and industry.The present thesis falls into five chapters. Chapter one is the introduction. This part states the objective of the research, clarifies relevant essential concepts, and defines the organization of this thesis. Chapter two presents the literature review of metaphor research. Generally speaking, there have already been a lot of researches in the West into lexical metaphors in EST, with impressive achievement,But such researches seem to be still rare in China. This is what lures us into attempting this choice of theme. Chapter three summarizes and discusses the strong and weak points of major metaphor theories. On the basis of the cognitive mechanism, we propose the tentative analytical model of this thesis. Chapter four calculates statistical distributions of lexical metaphors in EHE, and analyzes the sample with the aim of verifying the forming mechanism. Based on what has been discussed above, Chapter five draws the conclusion, points out findings of this research, and proposes suggestions for future work.