A Cognitive Study Of Metaphor And Metonymy Related To The Human Body

In the last2000years, scholars only treated metaphor as a figure of speech andmetaphor is traditionally viewed as a deviation of daily language or a particularrhetorical device. However, in1980, Lakoff and Johnson first analyzed metaphor fromthe cognitive perspective. In recent years, cognitive linguists hold quite a new view.Some of them suggest that metaphor is not only a figure of speech, but also a significantmetaphorical way of thinking. It is a cognitive activity which allows people to use amore concrete concept to understand or comprehend the experience of another abstractdomain. As we all know, human beings cognize the world following the cognitive law,that is from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract. It determinesthat human beings and their experiences are the basic way of comprehending the outsideworld. As Sage Protagoras, a Greek philosopher, once said,“Man is the measure of allthings”(cited from Wang Yin,2002:88). People have regarded their own body as themeasure of all things around, applied the cognitive experience of human body to thecognition of other things, and projected a certain part of the body onto other things inorder to understand the world. The typical way for people to think is what we calledhuman body cognition. Nowadays, the research on human-related metaphor is stillinsufficient though some scholars discuss metaphor from the perspective of civilizationor word formation. Hence, the thesis aims at probing into the problem by discussing thehuman-related metaphor and human-related metonymy from the cognitive perspective.The thesis analyzes how human beings comprehend the cognition of their bodiesand their experiences through using cognitive linguistics and contemporary metaphortheory to understand the cognition of the abstract material and the outside world. Thethesis is composed of the following four parts: the first Chapter briefly presents theresearch background, the purpose of research, the data collection and the organization ofthis thesis. Chapter two is the theoretical background, which reviews the current studyon the human-related metaphor and human-related metonymy both abroad and in China.This chapter provides the main theoretical framework for this thesis. It includes thedescription of conceptual metaphor, mapping theory, image schema and conceptualmetonymy. Chapter three is the main part of this thesis. Based on the theory introducedin chapter two, this chapter approachs human-related metaphor and human-related metonymy from four aspects:(1) two main metaphorical mapping concerninghuman-related metaphor：one is the mapping from the human domain to the non-humandomain, and the other is the mapping from the non-human domain to the human domain.(2) three main image schemas concerning human-related metaphor which includeUp-Down schema, Container schema and Path schema.(3) two typical metonymicdomains: Part-and-Whole human-related metonymy and Part-and-Part human-relateddomain.(4) Analysis of the conceptual metaphorical use of face and eye, themetonymical use of face and eye systematically and make the comparison betweenhuman-related metaphor and human-related metonymy. In the conclusion part, it pointsout that this study is still a tentative study from the perspective of cognition and it stillhas much to be judged and tested.