Chinese Metaphor Research

Metaphor is not only a means of rhetory, but also an ideastic instrument and cognitive way for the human kind to research the world .The essence of metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another. Let's take the sentence" Time is money, "for an instance. This metaphor is referring to understanding the abstract substance "time" just through the comparatively concrete substance "money " .The thesis studies the Chinese metaphor from the cognitive perspective.Firstly, the essence of metaphor is discussed. Metaphor is a kind of cognitive activity. Similiarity is the cognitive foundation of mataphor. Generally, metaphor has superficial meaning as well as deeper one. The foundamental mode of metaphor mapping is based on the mapping from source domain to target domain. Image schemes is the track of forming metaphor. Metaphor has the following five features: Metaphor is not a kind of isolated phenomenon, but a system formed in a certain culture Metaphor exists universally in our daily life ,it respresents the normal of language .The course of metaphor is mapping from soure domain to target domain. People always partly choose semantic features from source domain conception and target domain conception to constitute connection .The words collocation and combination in metaphor don't conform to semantic logic. Through analyzing Chinese material , we classified Chinese metaphors from such three different perspectives as common language,the founction type of morphology,the construction type of syntax metaphor. The main sources of metaphors are imagination, image analogy, quotation of fable , allegory and allusion ,borrowing of people'name and adage.Metaphors are researched by more and more people ,not only because metaphors exist in quantity as a kind of cognitive way in daily life, but also because metaphors have the function of creating new words,generating new meaning ,making word expression terse and vivid, with aethetics effect. At last, the article discussed that context, personal knowledge, social culture etc play an important role in metaphor comprehension.