Conceptual Integration Theory And Its Application To The Study Of Metaphor In Chairman Mao’s Poems

The research of traditional poems pays more attention to the figure of speech,especially to the metaphor and metonymy. With the development of the research fieldof cognitive science, the linguists at home and from abroad study poems fromcognitive aspects. According to the conceptual integration theory proposed byFauconnier and Turner, this paper tries to discuss the metaphor in Chairman Mao’spoems from the perspective of conceptual integration theory. This theory categoriesthe space of human thoughts and know the context and background knowledge and soon. After that, the information will be composite, completed and elaborated in order toproduce a new model which is more useful than before, that is, emergent structure.The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that the network model of conceptualintegration has the extreme power in analyzing poems especially the metaphor in thepoems and two-sided network is the most effective conceptual integration network ininterpreting the metaphor in the poems and the reasons.This paper chooses Chairman Mao’s poems as the research subject. Since hispoems represent some periods in which Chinese are in war with Japanese andKuomintang. Chinese fight with them with all the power and courage. In addition, hispoems are full of fruitful metaphor images, his emotion, opinions, dreams and beliefsare expressed vividly and incisively. According to these features in his poems, thisthesis tries to divide the images in the poems into three parts and analyze themrespectively. They are natural phenomena, social activities and mankind creations. The thesis tries to answer three questions; the first one is how the network model ofconceptual integration is applied in the analysis of the metaphor in Chairman Mao’spoems. The second one is how different conceptual integration networks are used toanalyze the metaphor in Chairman Mao’s poems. The third one is which of theconceptual integration networks is the most effective to interpret the metaphor inChairman Mao’s poems and the reasons. Through the research, we surprisingly findthat the network model of conceptual integration has the extreme power in analyzingthe poems especially the metaphor of the poems. At the same time, the conceptualintegration networks play a significant role in interpreting the metaphor in the poems,especially the two-sided network.