The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory To College English Vocabulary Teaching

Metaphors are indicated to perceive experience or imagine those kinds of things, such as psychological behaviors, linguistic behaviors and cultural behaviors. A lot of metaphors are used in the Chinese ancient poetries. Human language has become more rich and colorful due to the emergence of metaphor. Metaphor is the crystallization of human wisdom. More than 70 percent of ordinary language expressions derive from metaphors. Owing to the combination between human cognition and metaphors, the human language system will be innovated and developed. Metaphor is transformed from an unmixed linguistic problem into the device of understanding the world, expressing human thoughts and feelings. Metaphor becomes a very important research topic and gains much concern from many linguists.The systematic researches on the theory of metaphor conducted by the foreign scholars are more mature than those by the Chinese scholars. In Rhetoric and Poetics, Aristotle stated that metaphor was a rhetorical device and it worked chiefly in the language level, it was used to decorate the language, and the conditions and functions of the metaphor were restricted.In 1980, in their book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. indicated that metaphor was not only a rhetorical device but a cognitive device and a way of thinking. From Lakoff's point of view, metaphor was a kind of mapping based on the abstract image schema, that is, a familiar, easy-understood source domain was mapped to target domain, which was unfamiliar, abstract and difficult to be understood. By mapping, human recognize the unfamiliar cognitive domain via the familiar cognitive one in order to understand the objective world.Based on the previous researches of the metaphor, Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. studied it systematically. Their research findings are called Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which stated that human recognized the world through metaphor to a large extent. The main characters of human thinking were metaphorical. The human cognitive system was built up by metaphor. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory has become a whole with consistency and systematicity. This whole is the conceptual metaphor system. On the basis of the analysis of Lakoff and Johnson, conceptual metaphors can be divided into three different kinds: orientational metaphors, structural metaphors and ontological metaphors. Orientational metaphor is one of the most essential concepts human live by. Orientational metaphor is a series of metaphorical concepts, which are built in compliance with spatial orientation. Structural metaphor is to construct the structure of another concept B by using the structure of concept A. In this way, the utterances in concept B can be applied into concept A, and vice versa. Ontological metaphor is to abstract intangible concepts into tangible substances. Container metaphor is the most representative ontological metaphor.The application study of metaphor was developed by the mature research of metaphorical study. Cameron and Low published Researching and Applying Metaphor, they did their research in the domain of applied lingustics. In the book, the metaphorical theory was applied into the practice of language teaching, all kinds of applications of metaphor were studied. Many scholars found that prominent effects were reflected when the metaphorical theory was used to guide the foreign language learners to enlarge their vocabulary by the achievements of Cognitive semantics. This discovery contributed a lot to the further study conducted by the scholars. In 1988, Low stated that it was necessary to cultivate the language learners'metaphorical awareness to promote their vocabulary study. In the year of 1994, MacLennan announced that more attention should be paid to the impact of metaphorical theory in foreign language teaching, it was more effective for the foreign language learners to study languages under the condition of the mastery learning of the common metaphors. In 1996, Lazar pointed out the importance of metaphorical teaching; he believed that one of the effective ways to improve the amount of the vocabulary is to classify the metaphors in metaphorical modes. In the year of 1997, Laufer stated that two dominate aspects were included in vocabulary learning, they were metaphorical acceptation and ambiguity.Koveceses and Szabo were representatives of some linguists who had conducted the experimental study about the Conceptual metaphors in foreign language teaching. In 1996, Koveceses and Szabo got a conclusion about the great helpfulness of the comprehension and application of the meanings of the vocabulary affected by the foreign language learners'metaphorical awareness training from their experimental study. In the year of 1988, Boers did his research to testify that the improvement of the foreign language learners'metaphorical awareness could expedite their vocabulary storage.In the late of 1990s, some Chinese scholars paid their attention to the research of metaphor. In 1994, in his book, Lin Shuwu analyzed the cognitive functions and language structures of metaphor deeply. He retrospected the foreign studies on metaphor comprehensively. In 2000, Zhou Rong paid the attention to the cognitive mechanism of metaphor. In 2002, Liang Xiaobo explained the enlightenment of the foreign language teaching affected by Cognitive Linguistics, at the same time he emphasized that metaphor was an important tool to enlarge vocabulary meanings.In 2005, Li Fuyin and Tian Cong summarized the differences and relationships of the meaning formation of the Conceptual Metaphor theory and the Synthetic theory. In the year of 2006, Kan Liwen explored the cognitive origins of euphemism. Related studies in China demonstrated that there was enormous room in the descriptiveness of the Conceptual Metaphor theory in foreign language teaching.Vocabulary learning is one of the most important tasks of foreign language learning. Vocabulary learning, as the essential ingredient, exists the whole process of foreign language teaching. There are two major problems in the college English vocabulary learning, they are poor efficiencies and results. Many scholars believe that most of vocabulary can be gained by the way of metaphor. Language is the product of human cognition and human interactions, metaphor is an advantageous tool of human cognition, and therefore, it is very important for foreign language learning to study metaphor from the approach of cognition. The Conceptual Metaphor theory provides the theoretical basis to the vocabulary learning of the foreign languages in particular.In conclusion, the qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis will be combined so close in this paper that more scientific results can be acquired.