A Cultural Perspective To The Understanding Of Conceptual Metaphors

When the learning of English comes to a higher level for college students, namely, when the identifying and understanding of metaphors come to the list of their learning tasks, difficulties appears. Many scholars proposed different theories and methods for the resolution of this problem, such as Comparison Theory, Interaction Theory, Salience Imbalance Theory. This thesis, however, adopts a Western cultural perspective as its mainframe, and believes that cultural knowledge and cultural experience behind metaphors play a significant role during the process of understanding metaphors, especially the culturally variable ones. This thesis assumes that during the teaching of metaphors, if teachers could provide the cultural knowledge for students, and raise awareness of their cultural experience, their understanding of those conceptual metaphors will be facilitated.With individual interviews and questionnaire, this thesis collected its valid qualitative data for the following questions, that is,Why does the introduction of the different Western cultural perspective facilitate the understanding of their conceptual metaphors?How can the cultural perspective facilitate the comprehension of metaphors?The materials for the research are 20 metaphors from Obama's two speeches:Literacy and Education in a 21st-Centrury Economy (June, 2005)Speech as President Elected (November, 2008).The participants are non-English major students of year 2007 from two classes of Jilin University. And a comparative study was conducted between two classes with each class containing 40 students and between two groups with each group containing 4 people, and one class and one group of them were provided with the Western cultural knowledge behind corresponding metaphors, and the other class and group not. The results collected from them proved the assumptions of the research.The thesis proposes a definition of a cultural perspective. A cultural perspective in this thesis is the thinking, understanding and even acting upon a Western cultural knowledge and experience which reflects every discrete part of it in the 20 metaphorical expressions selected from Obama's two speeches, through which the participants understand and appreciate various expressions of conceptual metaphors.And the paper found theoretical support from a series of"relationships". According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), metaphors are built on their experiential bases. Each culture has its unique set of shared experiences, which provide them with a specific perspective, with which they view the world and respond to their environments. These similar experiences and perspective together with their responses to their environments make up the organizational"grid"of their minds,which is their cultural perspective. With the certain cultural perspective which reflects a particular culture as a helpful premise, the understanding of those conceptual metaphors will definitely be easier.