The Construction And Interpretation Of Metaphors In Mengzi: Within The Framework Of Adaptation-Relevance Model

While the metaphor fever has been coming up overwhelmingly over the past 30 years, Chinese classical literature like Mengzi, well known for its skillful employment of metaphor, has not yet received proper attention from scholars at home. Despite some studies that focused on metaphor in Mengzi as a rhetorical and literal technique, few of them took a cognitive-pragmatic approach to it, let alone concerned its construction and interpretation.To make up for the deficiency, the present theses studies the construction and interpretation of novel metaphors in Mengzi based on the combination of Adaptation-Relevance Model proposed by Ran Yongping at the macro-pragmatic level and Conceptual Mapping/Blending mechanism at the micro-semantic level. Macro-pragmatically, it is held that both metaphor construction and interpretation involve the dynamic relevance-oriented adaptation between linguistic choices and contextual correlates. The presumption of relevance is realized by adaptation of linguistic structures to contextual correlates which include mental world, social world, physical world, linguistic context and cognitive environment. At the micro-semantic level, Conceptual Mapping/Blending plays a vital role and in such sense it operates under the direction of adaptation-relevance.In addition to the theoretical framework, the thesis takes a data-driven approach with novel metaphor collected from Mengzi as its research target. Novel metaphor here is theoretically defined as similarity-creating metaphor, which is created through imagination and abstract thinking on the part of the constructor. Operationally, it is defined along two dimensions:1) a metaphor is novel in that it is the first time that the metaphor vehicle functions as a prototype of that category; 2) novel metaphors in Mengzi are those originating from it according to Ciyuan (the revised version).The main body of thesis is devoted to the construction and interpretation of metaphors in Mengzi, both of which consist of four interdependent sub-procedures. The construction side includes:use of metaphor as a strategy, choices of source domains, conceptual mapping/blending and linguistic realizations, the interpretation side:identification of metaphor, contextual assumptions of source domains, conceptual mapping/blending and inferential results. It is found that each sub-procedure is operated under the government of relevance-oriented adaptation to contextual correlates and all the sub-procedures do not necessarily run in a sequential order, but instead they are more likely to occur roughly at the same time. Specifically speaking, the main findings are:1) Choosing metaphor as a communicative strategy for arguing or persuading results from adapting to Mencius'mental world and social world for seeking optimal relevance.2) The selection of source domains is made by creating similarity and observing the principle of contiguity under the guidance of relevance presumption.3) Metaphor can be identified either through metaphor markers or conflict in semantic meaning or pragmatic meaning.4) Understanding source domains in the form of schema entails adaptation to cognitive environment, in particular, encyclopedia knowledge and logical information, while source domains in the form of a single entity involve contextual assumptions which must be constructed by seeking similarity according to the contiguity principle.5) The production and retrieval of metaphorical meanings depend ultimately on conceptual mapping or integration which works by linking the source domain with the target domain.This study is significant in that:it attempts to build an integrated explanatory model, combining pragmatic theories with cognitive approaches, for authentic metaphors in everyday use; its pragma-cognitive approach sheds new light on the study of Mengzi as well as other similar studies.