| The study of metaphor can be traced bake to Aristotle era, about two-thousand yearsago. With time flying people begin to realize that metaphor does not only a rhetoricaldevice but a thought pattern and a cognitive process. The book Metaphor We Live bywritten by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) presents the conceptual metaphor theory. They pointout that metaphor can construct the basic schema of perceiving experience and the world.Metaphor is a powerful cognitive tool for us to conceptualize the abstract category(Ungerer&Smith,1996:114). It is the sole method for people to understand the cognitiveability of human being and an essential way to deal with problems of the language learningand teaching (Mey,1993:301). Thus metaphor plays a very important role in understandinglanguage and using language to describe the world. Metaphor exists in our daily lifeincluding the thought, language and behavior.Cognitive linguistic points out that people usually understand and perceive the abstractand unfamiliar things in terms of the concrete and familiar things and thus a cognitiveapproach occurs. If metaphor plays a central role in understanding and expressing humanexperience, we can suppose it is the cohesive force in discourse （Diane Ponterotto，2000：238-298）. In the history of rhetoric and poetics studies, metaphor is considered as theprinciple of discourse construction. The scholars of discourse analysis always suggest thatit is very necessary to study the cohesive function of metaphor in discourse（Kovecses，2002:29). Scholars have already done abundant research on the essence, structure andfeatures of metaphor very successfully, but rare research have done on the cohesivefunction of metaphor in news discourse. According to the research, it is found that newsreports are full of metaphors and metaphorical expressions, and the applying of metaphorcould contribute to discourse cohesion and coherence. In addition, metaphors can makediscourse more vivid and easily to be understood. The present thesis regards the English news reports as the object of study. All thesamples of discourses are randomly collected from English newspapers and magazines. Thequalitative analysis is adopted in the present thesis. It is to analyze the cohesive function ofmetaphor in news discourses. Underneath the framework of conceptual metaphor, based onthe systematicity of metaphorical concepts, the present thesis is to analyze and explore howthese metaphors and metaphorical expressions stem from them cooperate to meet thecohesive role in news reports. According to the analysis of the samples given in this thesis, itis found that the metaphoric expressions forms systematic lexical cohesion network.Firstly, the present thesis introduces the background of the research, the structure of thethesis and the significance of the research. Afterwards, it presents the previous studies andthe contemporary researches on metaphor, discourse cohesion and conceptual metaphors innews discourses. The second part is to illustrate the methodology of the research. The fourthpart is the core of the present thesis. In this part, the present thesis is to analyze howconceptual metaphor contributes to discourse cohesion in news reports. Based on thedetailed description and explanation of conceptual metaphors in the ten samples, and thecohesive function of conceptual metaphor will be illustrated. And then the way ofconceptual metaphor contributing to the discourse cohesion is unveiled. The fifth part isdiscussion part which will discuss the results of the analysis of the samples firstly. And thenit reveals that compared with the cohesive function, there are some other functions ofconceptual metaphor. The last part is conclusion which points out the major findings,implication and the limitation of the present thesis. |
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