A Study Of Metaphors In Friends From The Perspective Of Cognition

The American comedy Friends, most popular in North America, has won the Emmy nominations and awards for ages.Metaphors are universal in it. Although studies have been done on Friends, many are on its subtitles translation, its communicative function of pragmatic vagueness, its familiar terms of address, its conversational joking and gender study, its verbal humor translation, its transference of pragmatic presupposition, its paralinguistic communication, or conversational implication, and so on. However, there have been few studies on its metaphors from the cognitive perspective. Therefore, the thesis researches metaphors of Friends from the perspective of cognition.This thesis first makes a general survey of studies of metaphor including the traditional views which are the Comparison View of Metaphor and Substitution View of Metaphor, the transitional view Interaction Theory, analyzing the theories of each school and indicating its weaknesses and limitation. The modern views of metaphor that are mainly the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the Blending Theory (BT) are introduced. In this paper,172 samples are collected from the first three seasons of Friends and analyzed from static viewpoint, dynamic viewpoint and both the static and dynamic viewpoints with theories of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Blending Theory and Mental Lexicon Theory. With metaphorical samples classified, discussed and analyzed, the thesis has arrived at the conclusions as follows:Firstly, metaphor being pervasive in everyday life (Lakoff & Johnson,1980) is confirmed.Secondly, the concrete source domain and the abstract source domain are co-existent in metaphors in the American comic Friends, which is the spread of CMT. Besides the concrete source domain that is mapped onto the abstract target domain, there are the other three types of source mapping actually:the concrete source domain mapped onto the concrete target domain, the abstract source domain mapped onto the concrete target domain, and the abstract source domain mapped onto the abstract target domain. Moreover, metaphors are essentially abstract.Thirdly, structures from not only the Input Spaces but also the Generic Space in BT are projected to the Blended Space and the Blended Space blends the structures including the ones of the Generic Space captured in the Generic Space.Fourthly, with the theories of CMT and BT, the interpretation of the metaphor is inseparable from the Mental Lexicon Theory. The selection retrieval of the metaphor language is the connection with the conceptual level, the lexeme level, and the lemma level within the semantic network of the Mental Lexicon. The spreading activation models of the Mental Lexicon provide the most realistic prospect for the language formal selection and interpretation of metaphors.Represented by Friends, both the mechanism of it and the mental process of how to use metaphors are discussed here from the cognitive perspectives in order to better understand the connotation and selection of language forms in different cultural contexts, enriching the integrative studies of the theories in linguistics and culture.