A Metaphorical Study Of English Compound Adjectives

Compounding or composition is one of the word-building processes in English. It refers to the process in which words are built by joining two or more stems together. Thus a compound is a unit consisting of two or more stems. The kind of compounds is various, compound nouns occupy the largest number, and compound adjectives take the second place. Many compound adjectives contain metaphorical meanings, so it is necessary to study them.Metaphor is traditionally considered as a figure of speech. The publication of the masterpiece Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson until1980s, marked the beginning of cognitive turn for metaphor studies. Metaphor is not only seen as a rhetorical means any more, but also as a way of human thinking. As part of cognitive linguistic research, cognitive approach to metaphor includes Lakoff s conceptual metaphor theory and Fauconnier’s mental spaces and conceptual blending theory. Lakoff and Johnson firstly propose conceptual metaphor in Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff&Johnson1980), in which the definition of metaphor is also stated. They (Lakoff&Johnson1980,6) explain that "the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another", and in their opinion,"metaphor is pervasive in everyday life"(Lakoff&Johnson1980,4).Not all the meanings of compound adjectives are the simple addition of the meanings of the two components. Some compound adjectives have new metaphorical meanings. In this paper, the author adopts the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) put forward by Lakoff and Johnson, and Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) proposed by Gills Fauconnier and Mark Turner which is based on the CMT to interpret the metaphorical meanings in English compound adjectives. The analysis in this thesis attempts to provide an explanation of metaphor and metonymy as the semantic motivation to compound adjectives, and an interpretation of the meaning construction process of compound adjectives using CBT.This study of the metaphorical meanings in English compound adjectives from the cognitive perspective will contribute to expanding the research of the meaning construction of the English compound adjectives, and will also help the learners to understand and use them better.