A Study Of Metaphors In Bai Juyi’s Sentimental Poems From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Traditionally, metaphor is just treated as a rhetorical tool in literature, however, cognitive linguistics contends that metaphor is an important cognitive device. It is the mapping relations between two independent conceptual domains. The essence of the conceptual metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another. As the development of cognitive linguistics in the recent years, more and more scholars and researchers try to interpret our world from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory. It shows the strong explanatory and practical power of conceptual metaphor. Metaphor and poetry have a close relationship, and metaphor is widely used in poetry. In other word, poetry is a metaphorical language.This thesis takes Bai Juyi’s sentimental poems as research object and analyzes the metaphors in them from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory. The study has shown that metaphors are pervasively used in Bai Juyi’s sentimental poems and these metaphors which derive from personal experiences and cultural experiences reflect the life style of people and social culture in Tang dynasty. The chapter one of this thesis reviews the previous studies about the metaphor in poetry and argues that the metaphor has a close relationship with poetry. Then it also explains the conceptual metaphor theory in detail. The conceptual metaphor theory emphasizes that metaphor is not only a matter of language, but also a way of cognition. Chapter two gives a brief introduction of Bai Juyi and reveals the significance and previous studies about Bai Juyi’s sentimental poems. As a great realistic poet of Tang dynasty, Bai Juyi wrote a variety of poems all his life, among which, the two sentimental poems Song of Eternal Sorrow and Song of a Pipa Player are the best known. It has lots of metaphors in Bai Juyi’s sentimental poems which are of great value. Chapter three is the main part of this thesis which analyzes the metaphors in Bai Juyi’s sentimental poems detailedly. It has found that the metaphors of Bai Juyi’s sentimental poems can be classified into three types--structural metaphors, ontological metaphors and orientational metaphors. Structural metaphors consist of time metaphors, emotional metaphors, love metaphors, numeral metaphors and illness metaphors, which reflect the poet’s life style, personal belief and thoughts of that time. Structural metaphors are main metaphors used in Bai Juyi’s sentimental poems. Ontological metaphors include substance metaphors, personification metaphors and container metaphors which are rooted in the social background and physical experiences of the poet. And the orientational metaphors are mainly based on people’s upward and downward orientations. They reveal the tumultuous political career and diverse experiences of the poet.This thesis applies the conceptual metaphor theory into the analysis of Bai Juyi’s sentimental poems, tries to give a new insight into Bai Juyi’s poems and proves that metaphor is a useful cognitive tool in cognizing literary works. Metaphor is coherent with the culture. The metaphors in Bai Juyi’s poems are all rooted in the physical and cultural experiences, so these metaphors and metaphorical expressions in his sentimental poems reflect the specific cultural and social life of that time. What’s more, this thesis paraphrases the mentioned poems in English to help people know well about the meanings of them.