The Application Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory To The Study Of Gestures

Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson, this thesis attempts to investigate metaphors expressed in gestures. Through the quantitative and qualitative studies of a lecture on linguistics, the use of gestures in expressing metaphors are observed and analyzed. It is found that metaphors as cross-domain mappings in the conceptual system are in fact modality-independent. And gestures as one modality of metaphoric representation are by no means simple illustrations or replication of verbal metaphors. In fact, they re-actualize subconsciously our physically experienced process of attaining the abstract. Thus the study of gestures can provide insights into the metaphoric conceptualization of abstract ideas.The discourse that this thesis tries to analyze is a lecture on linguistics. Though there is research in China on gestures performed by teachers in class, none has studied gestures from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, metaphor in particular. Therefore, by drawing on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson as well as integrating the system of multimodality, a classification scheme for metaphoric gestures is presented, and the relationship between gestures and words in the process of metaphoric representation is discussed.The thesis argues that Lakoff and Johnson failed to consider modalities other than words when they first put forward the conceptual metaphor theory. Therefore, their classification of metaphors as ontological, orientational and structural ones is in fact the classification of metaphoric words. It’s necessary to explore whether the classification scheme abstracted from metaphoric words are also applicable to metaphoric gestures. Since metaphors can be manifested in both gestures and words, the relationship between metaphoric gestures and words are explored. It is found that gestures and words may work together to express the same metaphor. They share one source and target domain in the conceptual mapping process. They may also be backed up by different metaphors and use separate source domains to represent the same target domain. In addition, there are cases where source and target domain of a metaphor does not necessarily co-present in multimodalities. Gestures may be the only modality in which a metaphor is represented, so are words. To unpack the metaphor represented in gestural, verbal or gestural-verbal compounds, one needs to refer to the contextual features, spatial elements as well as the knowledge of linguistic theories.The research is expected to enlighten the successive researchers to re-inspect Conceptual Metaphor Theory in the kinetic domain of gestures and in the context of linguistic lecture. Hopefully, it can offer insights into the study of metaphoric gestures and its relationship with the accompanying words.