A Study Of Personification Metaphor Based On Conceptual Integration Theory

Traditional linguistics regarded metaphors as a kind of language phenomenon, a form of language rhetoric, and an embellishment of language. From the ancient Greek Aristotle, people started to explore the mysteries of metaphor from the perspective of rhetoric. In recent years, due to the rise and development of cognitive linguistics, people begin to make deep study of metaphor from the cognitive perspective. Lakoff and Johnson (1987) first said, metaphors were the construction of people’s thoughts and actions of their way of thinking. They proposed the conceptual metaphor theory in the book Metaphors We Live By, which was published in1980, and then divided conceptual metaphor into three categories:ontological metaphor, structural metaphor and orientational metaphor. They thought personification metaphor was an important type of ontological conceptual metaphor. From then on, studying on personification metaphor has attracted researchers’attention.In the1990s, Fauconnier and Turner created conceptual integration theory, and it has been showing great explanatory power in meaning construction of nature language, which has had a great impact on the understanding of metaphors. Like other metaphors, personification metaphors also contain cognition and thinking process of metaphors. However, traditional linguistics explained personification metaphors from the rhetorical perspective, and rarely studying personification metaphors from the cognitive perspective. Based on conceptual integration theory proposed by Fauconnier, and choosing personification metaphor as its research objective, this thesis applies the theoretical framework of conceptual integration theory to interpret personification metaphor. By using the conceptual integration theory to study the personification metaphor, we find that:On the one hand, experience is the cognitive basis of personification metaphor, through the two aspects of physical experience and psychological experience to operate; on the other hand, as a basic cognitive mechanism, the conceptual integration theory can not only explain the language phenomenon of personification metaphor, but also carry out dynamic on-line meaning construction of personification metaphor, and construction ways include semantic conflict, semantic mapping and semantic integration; the construction models are based on four network models of conceptual integration theory, that is, simplex network, mirror network, single-scope network and double-scope network model. The four network models precede meaning construction of personification metaphor according to their working mechanism, which reveals the cognitive process of understanding personification metaphor. This paper not only demonstrates that conceptual integration is a universal cognitive mechanism, but also provides a new perspective to the study of personification metaphor.The thesis consists of six chapters. In the first chapter, an overview of the whole thesis is presented first. It interprets the research background, purposes and significance, and then reviews the history and present situation of the research, finally introduces the framework of this thesis. The second chapter is an overview of personification metaphor, and introduces definitions, classifications and functions of personification metaphor. The third chapter is the theoretical foundation of the thesis, namely the conceptual integration theory. This chapter systematically introduces the development of conceptual integration theory, network models of conceptual integration theory and types of conceptual integration networks. The fourth chapter mainly studies the cognitive basis of personification metaphor which is based on conceptual integration theory, and two aspects are discussed from the physical and psychological experience. The fifth chapter analyzes the meaning construction of the personification metaphor from conceptual integration theory. Combined with specific examples, it demonstrates three types of constructing personification metaphor, that is: semantic conflict, semantic mapping and semantic integration. It also probes the construction models of personification metaphor based on conceptual integration theory, combined with four sub-networks of conceptual integration, analyzing personification metaphor associated with humor, politics, and poetry, which describes the cognitive mechanism of the meaning construction of personification metaphor in details. Through the dynamic nature of cognitive process displayed, it demonstrates the feasibility of conceptual integration theory of personification metaphor within the explanation framework.