From The Point Of View Of Cognitive Linguistics, The Comparative Study Of Zhimo And Yeats Poems Of Love Metaphor

Metaphor is omnipresent in our life. People employ a lot of metaphors in their daily life.According to traditional metaphorical theories, metaphor is a figure of speech or play ofwords. But the contemporary metaphor theory takes metaphor as a cognitive tool.This thesis first introduces to us the definition, characteristics, nature of metaphor andmain approaches to the study of metaphor. Then it makes a comparative study of loveconceptual metaphors from Xu Zhimo's and Yeats's poems by adopting cognitive linguisticapproach so as to explore how metaphor comes into being, what is the working mechanismand what are the functions of metaphor and how people use metaphor as a tool to perceiveabstract notions and conduct abstract reasoning.Meanwhile, the comparative study of love conceptual metaphors from cognitive linguisticperspective provides evidence from two languages——English and Chinese and twodifferent cultures——Western culture and Chinese culture to support the contemporarytheory of metaphor. It is shown that metaphor is a cognitive tool which has an experientialbasis. People perceive and conceptualize abstract notions such as the emotion of love interms of more concrete ones with the help of metaphor. Same or similar humanphysiological structure and life experience serve as the bases for similar conceptualmetaphors while different cultures produce cultural specific conceptual metaphors. Thecomparative study is also conducive to exploring the universality and cultural specialty ofhuman cognition.