A Cognitive Analysis Of The Metaphor And The Metonymy Of JIAO In Chinese

From the ancient times till now, plenty of researches have been done on metaphor. Traditionally, metaphor was mostly studied in the fields of rhetoric and literature. It was only viewed as a deviation from plain language and primarily a rhetorical or poetic device. Ever since the 1970s, the study of metaphor has aroused attention and passion of the scholars in various fields from different perspectives. The publication of the book Metaphors We Live By coauthored by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980 was a breakthrough in metaphor study. They hold that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive one. Metaphor allows people to understand a relatively abstract concept by virtue of a more concrete concept. It has an important cognitive function.Like metaphor, metonymy, in cognitive linguistics, is not only a rhetoric device, but also a basic cognitive tool for our understanding of the world. Metonymy is a mechanism of using one easy-to-perceive and easy-to-understand aspect of something to stand for the whole thing or some other aspect of it. As human being's cognitive tools, metonymy and metaphor differ from each other, but also share some similarities.The law that human being cognizes things from the near to the far, from the simple to the complicated, from the concrete to the abstract determines the fundamental role of human body in cognizing the world. People often understand and experience other things based on knowledge of the body and the body parts. Body metaphor and metonymy are two important cognitive methods of human being. Large numbers of studies on body metaphor and metonymy have been done, but those based on the modern theories of metaphor and metonymy are still not enough.Based on the theories of cognitive linguistics and employing sufficient language data, this thesis aims to analyze the metaphor and metonymy of Chinese jiao, including the metaphorical mechanism of words and phrases containing jiao as a noun, the metonymic mechanism of words and phrases containing jiao as a noun, and the metaphorical mechanism of typical verbs of jiao. Through the analysis, we conclude that the metaphor and metonymy of Chinese jiao are grounded in our body experience; the metaphorical and metonymic projection of jiao follows the cognitive rule--from the near to the far, from the simple to the complicated, and from the concrete to the abstract; image schemas play an essential role in the metaphor of body parts and actions of body parts.The cognitive analysis of the metaphor and metonymy of jiao, to a certain degree, supplements the study of body metaphor, and supports the cognitive theory on metaphor.