Lakoff Conceptual Metaphor Studies

Cognitive linguistics, developed rapidly in 1980s and 1990s, has become one of themajor schools of emerging linguistics. Conceptual metaphor has an extremely importantstatus in cognitive linguistics. It contains rhetorical metaphor and poetic metaphor, reflectingin people’s language, thought and actions, even permeates in our daily life.Lakoff, the founder of conceptual metaphor, wrote a book named Metaphors we live byin 1980 with Johnson. It attracted the attentions of linguistics at once and started the preludeof conceptual metaphor. Women, fire and dangerous things, wrote by Lakoff in 1987,establishes the absolute position of conceptual metaphor in cognitive linguistics. Lakoff basedon the experiential philosophy. He criticized the western empiricism and rationalism, andchallenged the traditional philosophy. There is much information about domestic study ofconceptual metaphor, but few for Lakoff. In order to grasp Lakoff and his theory accurately,this paper seeks to restore the original appearance of the authors and his works. There are fivechapters in the paper:Chapter one introduces the academic background of Lakoff’s conceptual metaphortheory. Conceptual metaphor bases on philosophy, psychology, anthropology and many otherdisciplines. It is not a pure linguistic theory, but an interdisciplinary theory.Chapter two discusses the essence of conceptual metaphor which is traceable to human’scognition. While many concepts are established by metaphors, conceptual metaphor helps usto understand a sentence more easily in a certain context. According to Lakoff’s views,conceptual metaphor is divided into three parts: orientation metaphor, ontological metaphorand structural metaphor. Each part has a detailed analysis.Chapter three introduces the working mechanism and characteristics of conceptualmetaphor. According to Lakoff’s study, conceptual metaphor is mathematical mapping formsource domain to target domain. Conceptual metaphor forms the series graphics to an imageschema in brain by perception. It also has systematic, coherent, experiential characteristics.Chapter four is mainly about the prospect of conceptual metaphor. The research will goon along three directions of exploration, validation and practice. At the same time, this partalso points out the limitations of conceptual metaphor theory and hopes to make it up soon.The last Chapter is about the application of conceptual metaphor theory in Chinese. Thispart takes“anger”and economic discourses for example and makes analysis.