A Study Of Metaphoreme: From Theory To Practice

A metaphoreme is a basic unit of metaphor analysis, manifested as a relatively stablemulti-word expression with a metaphorical meaning in a given discourse. It is a bundle oflexico-grammatical, semantic, pragmatic and affective features that constrainsinterpretation while allowing some variability in use. Like phoneme, morpheme andsyntaxeme, metaphoreme is an abstract term created for better analysis of language.Metaphor is a very important way of thinking. By investigating people’s use ofmetaphors, we can better understand their emotions, attitudes and conceptualizations, asindividuals and as participants in social life. Traditional ways of metaphor analysis focuson the many conventionalized or “dead” metaphors strewn throughout a language becausethese dead metaphors are held to realize the conceptual mappings that we use to makesense of our everyday experiences; the importance of other metaphorically-usedexpressions in non-literary discourses, which are frequent but not well accounted for bycurrent cognitive metaphor theory, is neglected. We term these non-literal expressions witha relatively fixed form and highly specific semantic and pragmatic meanings“metaphoremes”.The current study takes a political discourse---Premier Wen’s Press Conference onMarch14th,2012as the text to be analyzed and employs an emergentist perspective tohighlight the non-linear change and self-organizing behavior of complex systems, whichperfectly demonstrates the coalescence of linguistic form, semantic, pragmatic, andaffective meanings around the metaphorical expressions. The study provides evidence thatpositing metaphoreme as a unit of analysis and of learning has explanatory power andpractical significance.