A Cognitive Approach To Emotion Metaphors In Fortress Besieged

The research of metaphor has a long history for more than2000years. It can be traced back to Aristotle, whose Comparison View has a profound influence on the latter metaphor studies. The two linguists Lakoff&Johnson published the work Metaphors We Live By in1980s which has laid the cognitive foundation for metaphor study. They consider metaphor is a universal cognitive construal, and is the mapping from the source domain to the target domain. It suggests one concept in the target domain can be understood and interpreted in terms of another in the source domain. Metaphor is everywhere in our daily life. It not only exists in language, but also is in the thinking mode, process of human cognition and emotions.Emotion is one of the most important human experiences. One basic mission of human cognition is to make a research about emotion. Because emotions are abstract and difficult, they are often metaphorized so that there are many vivid and colorful emotion metaphorical expressions in a language.Fortress Besieged, a novel written by Chinese scholar Qian Zhongshu, is full of intelligence and philosophy. It is mostly characterized by the metaphorical expressions in the circumstance of Chinese culture. Based on the conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual blending theory, and other related theories of emotion metaphors, this thesis is to study the emotion metaphors in Fortress Besieged and to explain their metaphorical motivations.This thesis indicates that there are various emotion metaphors in Fortress Besieged. The lively and colorful metaphorical expressions in this novel are greatly concerned with Chinese culture. The emotion metaphors mainly result from the cognitive construals such as the semantic conflicts, mappings, and conceptual blending. The emotion metaphorical expressions are connected with the cognitive embodiment of the characters in the novel.