A Cognitive Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphors Of Life In The Golden Cangue

With the rising of cognitive metaphor in the 1980's, the role of metaphor began to regain its importance. In the newly-rising cognitive linguistics, metaphor occupies a very important position: it is an important tool to help us to have a better understanding towards the world. Lakoff and Johnson (1980), as the founder of cognitive linguistics, put forward for the first time that metaphor is closely related with human cognitive system in their famous book Metaphors We Live By. Human conceptual system was constructed metaphorically and metaphor expressed through language originated from metaphorical conceptual system itself. This thesis analyzes conceptual metaphor of life in The Golden Cangue written by Elieen Chang from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.For a long time, literary works with metaphorical meanings on topics like"love","life"and"death"are everywhere to find, but not many of them are very good. The writer of this thesis finds out through research that conceptual metaphors of life in the novel The Golden Cangue enjoys uniqueness and originality, for example, human life is metaphorized as a golden cangue, a tale, a dead chicken's claws and a place where there is no light. And so far, no one has ever conducted special metaphorical researches on"life"metaphors in the novel; therefore, it possesses a research value. On one hand, through metaphorical analysis of life, this thesis reveals defamiliarization and vividness formed by metaphors in the novel; on the other hand, by analyzing cognitive functions of literary metaphors in the novel to illustrate that conceptual metaphors used to describe human characters are actually indispensible cognitive tools for the author of the novel to shape characters and inject vitality into literary works.This thesis applies western metaphorical theories into case study of literature. Based on theories of conceptual metaphor and cognitive mechanism of metaphor put forward by Lakoff and Johnson, this thesis conducts a comprehensive cognitive analysis on the whole mapping process from the source domain to the target domain of conceptual metaphors of life in The Golden Cangue."Life"is an abstract concept and it has a vague meaning and structure. No one can holistically define the word"life", but we can concretize it by utilizing cognitive means, for example,"life is a journey". By forming a simple image schema in the head (e.g. path schema), people can map part of features of journey (source domain) onto that of life (target domain) so as to conceptualize it.The theories of conceptual metaphor and cognitive mechanism of metaphor are both important theories of contemporary cognitive linguistics. So far, many scholars have carried out research and illustration on these two theories from different perspectives. However, no matter viewed from which perspective, the understanding towards the meaning of metaphor can not do without theories of conceptual metaphor, especially can not do without cognitive mechanisms of metaphor.