A Study On Metaphors In Chinese Ancient Poetry

Chinese ancient poetry, as the typical representative of Chinese literature, is the oldest and most brilliant literary form. It is also irreplaceable in history of world literature. With its terse language, sprightly rhythms and strong metres, Chinese ancient poetry is adroit at containing rich metaphors. Metaphor is the indispensable part of Chinese ancient poetry; therefore its function is to be reckoned with. The analysis of metaphors in Chinese ancient poetry has great theoretical and application value.It has been a long history for the research on metaphors, dating back to ancient Rome and Greek. In the 1980s, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) put forward the conceptual metaphor theory and classify metaphors into three types: the structural metaphor, the orientational metaphor and the ontological metaphor, thus they open a new way to the study of metaphors. Metaphor has been promoted from a traditional single rhetorical device to a cognitive level. One distinguishing feature of Chinese ancient poetry is its rich schemata. These schemata are usually laden with metaphors, so the schema theory can be used to analyze Chinese ancient poetry. From the new perspectives, we may reanalyze Chinese ancient poetry with these new ways.Grounded on Lakoff and Johnson (1980)'s conceptual metaphor theory, this paper adopts qualitative method, takes examples from Chinese ancient poetry to analyze three types of metaphors and discusses the reason and process of the generation of metaphors. In addition, the author applies the schema theory to analyze the linguistic schemata and cultural schemata in Chinese ancient poetry. By means of these analyses, the author makes the conclusion that: metaphors and schemata exist side by side and play a part together.All in all, as the research on metaphors develop multidisciplinarily more and more people begin to pay attention to metaphors in Chinese ancient poetry. With the analysis of metaphors in Chinese ancient poetry, the author hopes this paper to be a stimulus to its development and make more scholars know metaphors in Chinese ancient poetry.