| Metaphor is an omnipresent phenomenon of language. British rhetoricianRichards once said,“In our everyday conversation, there may exist one metaphor inevery three sentences”(Richards1936:98). Therefore, metaphor is the most commonlanguage phenomenon in the human language. The study of metaphor can be tracedback to the time of Ancient Greece. During that time, many philosophers wereinterested in the study of metaphor. The traditional metaphorical theory considers thatmetaphor is only one of problems of language which has nothing to do with thinking.The traditional metaphorical theory considers languages of human being are notmetaphorical, but a kind of Figurative Language. In the year of1980, Lakoff andJohnson, the famous American linguists, published a book named Metaphor We LiveBy. They proposed the cognitive approach to the study on metaphor in the first time.They think metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a kind of people’smode of thinking and a cognitive method. We could meet metaphor everywhere in ourdaily life, not only in language, but also in people’s idea and action.As we know, there are so many scholars make study on metaphors in our dailylife recently, but only a few persons research on metaphors in song lyrics. Hence, thereason why this thesis chooses the English popular song lyrics as data: firstly, peoplehave been used to combining songs and life together nowadays. Many popular songlyrics come from our daily life, they are very vivid; secondly, writers of song lyricsneed only several minutes to state their points of view and opinions of an event, it isin tune with the fast-paced life of modern society.This thesis reviews the research of metaphor by western and Chinese scholarsfirstly, including different definitions given by different scholars and the classificationof metaphor. The study of metaphor has a very long history in western countries.Many researches of metaphor by western philosophers, rhetoricians and linguists havevery important reference value for us to recognize metaphorical phenomenon, especially the contemporary western multidisciplinary researches of metaphor whichhave great inspiration for us. If we want to build our own metaphorical study, we haveto make the systematical study about all kinds of existing metaphorical theoriesabroad. At the same time, we should explore and arrange the discourse aboutmetaphor study by the scholars from our own country.This thesis also makes an overview of different approaches to metaphor. In thisthesis, we analyze emotional metaphor and cognitive metaphor in English popularsong lyrics mainly.Emotion, as an important aspect of human experience, it is an important subjectof cognitive linguistics. Emotion is an abstract concept, however, emotion is notvague or hard to clarify; it is conceptualized and expressed in metaphorical terms,metaphors play a very important role in the conceptualization of emotion. If you wantto understand the real meaning of English popular song lyrics, you have to make asystematic analysis from the point of view of metaphor, and specifying andclassifying the relevant metaphorical expressions. In the past time, the study ofemotional metaphors only focused on two kinds of emotions---HAPPINESS andANGER. However, this thesis makes analysis from five basic humanemotions—HAPPINESS, ANGER, SADNESS, FEAR and LOVE. The researchdiscovers that emotional metaphors have a mark to follow. Emotions can be describedby orientation, color, the reaction of body, surrounding environment and so on. Suchas “Happiness is up”,“Happiness is a light”,“Happiness is one of facial expression(smile/laugh)”, while “Sadness is down”,“Sadness is darkness”; in respect ofANGER, they have “Anger is heat” in common; with regard to LOVE, LOVE interms of PLANT, HEART or WAR. Of course, the analysis of emotional metaphoroften depends on the context.It is not enough to make analysis only on emotional metaphor in English popularsong lyrics, but it is also necessary to start analysis on cognitive metaphor. This thesiswill analyze cognitive metaphor in English popular songs based on ConceptualMetaphor Theory (CMT) and Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT). The cognitiveapproach claims that metaphor arises from mapping among different cognitivedomains, especially the mapping from the concrete domains to the abstract ones. In the working mechanism of metaphor, Conceptual Metaphor Theory holds thatmetaphor works by mapping from the source domain to the target domain; ConceptualBlending Theory points out the shortcomings of Conceptual Metaphor Theory whichis a complement to the mapping theory. It claims that metaphor arises from thesimultaneous interaction among four mental spaces with a result of blended space andan emergent structure. Lyric writers used a large amount of metaphors in song lyricsto create a popular poetry language; they combine art and life together and make usunderstand language from a new angle. Lyric writers used metaphor to describe someabstract concepts and bring one beautiful picture for lyric readers; readers canunderstand the inner thoughts of lyric writers deeply. Sometimes, in order to avoidtasteless writing, lyric writers hide their inner thoughts by metaphor; in other words,lyric writers also hope their lyrics could make readers thinking deeply. For readers,metaphors make lyrics more vivid; readers have a further understanding aboutmetaphor by data analysis. At the same time, language learners also can understandthe implied meaning of words and cultural habits by metaphor in song lyrics so as toimprove the comprehension and discrimination of English language, eventuallyimprove ability of the use of language. |
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