Conceptual Integration Approach To The Metaphors Of The Book Of Poetry: The Regional Songs

Metaphor is pervasive as a cognitive thinking method. There are abundantmetaphorical expressions in The Book of Poetry: The Regional Songs (henceforthSongs), through which abstract meanings and complex emotions are indirectly conveyed.People have been focusing their attention on the metaphorical expressions used in Songsfor a long time, but their emphasis is mainly placed on the analysis of the rhetoricalfunction of metaphor treated as a rhetoric device employed in Songs. Few have paidserious attention to how the meaning of metaphorical expressions occurring in many ofthe poems contained in Songs can be dynamically constructed from the cognitivelinguistic perspective.This thesis aims to illustrate the meaning construction and the interpretive processof metaphors that occur in Songs based on Conceptual Integration Theory proposed byFauconnier (1997). More specifically, metaphors in Songs are firstly classified into fourtypes: the plant metaphors, the animal metaphors, the water metaphors and othermetaphors, according to the different types of source domains involved. Then, a seriesof optimality principles and some basic types of integration networks of ConceptualIntegration Theory are employed to analyze the meaning construction and theinterpretive processes of these four types of metaphors in Songs. In order to grasp thedeep meanings of the poems, the readers need to access to various kinds ofencyclopedic knowledge, including their personal experiences and some backgroundinformation about the poems concerned.Besides, through the analyses of the meaning construction of metaphors in Songs,this thesis proposes a semi-mirror network which is distinct from the mirror networkmentioned in Conceptual Integration Theory. All the spaces in a mirror network sharethe same organizing frame while the organizing frame of the spaces in a semi-mirrornetwork is different prima facie but remains the same in terms of the deep structure.