Cognitive Research On Metaphor Of Computer And Netspeak

Since the works Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson waspublished in1980, metaphor became the focus of many scholars both abroad and athome. The study on metaphor has been exploring in contemporary viewpoint that holdsmetaphor is an universal way of thinking and cognition, not only as a rhetorical tool intraditional viewpoint. The contemporary theories of metaphor advance that metaphorexists not only in languages, but also in the action and the way of thinking of humanbeings, and metaphor is common phenomenon in people’s daily life. In essence, ourconceptual system is basically metaphorical.In the light of the conceptual metaphor theory, first proposed by Lakoff andJohnson, the nature of metaphor is to understand, construct and enunciate anotherconcept with the known concept, namely, the realization of cross-domain mapping fromthe source domain to a certain target domain.Computer and internet is one of the most remarkable inventions in this century,even in the whole history of human beings, raising earthshaking changes to our lives.Computer and internet brings us a new round of revolution in languages and culture,more than in technological field. Therefore, netspeak as the completely new product-byof computer and internet, has been attracting attentions from each research realm. Somelinguists even predicted that “Web Linguistics”, a new branch of linguistics，is cominginto being. Study on netspeak, a challenging task, does comply with the need ofdevelopment of era.This thesis aims to carry out a detailed study of the computer and internet languagewithin the theoretical framework of the Conceptual Metaphor, to make people aware ofthe universality and the extreme importance of metaphors on Internet, and to inspire theEnglish teaching. Based on some naturally-occurring data, the thesis revealed thehidden metaphorical mechanism of seven conceptual metaphors of netspeak. From theperspective of netspeak, through observing, explaining and studying the relationship between the working mechanism of conceptual metaphor and netspeak, this thesisworks to cultivate discourse communication skills, and promote the benign developmentof the standard netspeak.