A Study Of Lexical Metaphor In EST From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

With the development of the multi-disciplinary research of metaphor in recent years, metaphor has become the focus of philosophy, linguistics and psychology. Currently the focus of the metaphor study is not the rhetorical function but the cognitive one as a thinking mode. It is claimed that metaphor is a cognitive style in the book Metaphors We Live By which was coauthored by Lakoff and Johnson. Science and technology is closely related with the cognitive ability of human beings. As English for science and technology(EST) is an important carrier of science and technology, it draws more and more attention from the linguistic field. The conceptual metaphor as an important theory of cognitive linguistics is used to analyze the essence of language in terms of cognition. The purpose of this thesis is to use the theory of conceptual metaphor to study EST so that we will find the nature and performance of metaphor in EST.The lexis in Mechanical English, as a branch of the lexis in EST, is the innovative points of this thesis. And the author will focus on the lexis of Mechanical English to start the research. The corpus of this thesis comes from a dictionary named The Two-way Dictionary of Construction Machinery which was compiled by the China Construction Machinery Academy Council of Hoisting Machinery. First, this thesis discusses the forming ways and features of the lexis in Mechanical English. Then according to conceptual metaphor theory, the metaphor in the lexis of Mechanical English is categorized into three groups: "orientational metaphor", "structural metaphor" and "ontological metaphor", Further, a qualitative method is adopted to explore the nature of the metaphor in EST from the perspective of the mechanism in conceptual metaphor.The results of the study indicate that the working mechanism of conceptual metaphor is mapping between the source domain and the target domain on the basis of similarities, which proves the great power of conceptual metaphor in the birth of EST. Among the types of conceptual metaphor in the lexis of EST, human body metaphors in ontological metaphor are the main forming ways of the lexical metaphor in Mechanical English. At the same time, due to the economical principle in language system, the application of metaphor in EST is an irresistible tendency. Therefore, the author hopes this research could enhance the cognitive function and teaching significance of metaphor in EST and promote the positive effect of scientific development in human cognitive and teaching process.