Research On The Theory Of Metaphor

Metaphor has been an important research topic in the study of aesthetic theory.Throughout the history of metaphor study,the understanding of metaphor is mainly divided into two groups;one school thinks that metaphor is a rhetorical device of language,others who think that metaphor is a way of thinking.The metaphor is a kind of rhetoric means occupies the mainstream status for a long time.But there are also theorists such as Vico believe that metaphor is a way of thinking and occupies the basal position in the human mind.With linguistic turn in the 1960s,more and more theorists begin to realize that metaphor is not only exists in language,also exists in people's thinking.As a way to know the world,metaphor exists in everywhere.This article embarks from the different discussion about the nature of the metaphor,on the basic theories of Vico Cassirer and Foucault proposed that image thinking is the essence of metaphor.Then the article tries to talk about the classification and function of metaphor.In particular,the article is divided into the following four chapters:In chapter one,this paper investigated the idea,and on this basis,continue to explore the conceptual metaphor which birth in the 1980s proposed by Lakoff and Johnson in the book of Metaphors We Live By.We agree with the idea that metaphor is a basic way to know the world for human beings,but challenged their idea that metaphor comes from the experience of relevance.Then we investigated the poetic thinking which proposed by Vico and Cassirer's theory of pars pro toto.On the basic of ideas of Vico and Cassirer,in chapter two we proposed that metaphor comes from image thinking.Human beings have to understand the world by image.In order to make its visualization,human have to impose a strange things to certain characteristics of known things,to make it look similar.That is to say,the similarity is artificial,rather than the thing itself inherent.In chapter three,this paper will classify different kind of metaphors.The essence of metaphor has a unified,but does not mean that metaphor involve only one type.We classify different kind of metaphors by the standard that different metaphor appears in time in human's thinking.On this standard metaphors will be divided into visualize metaphor and conceptual metaphor.Visualize metaphors are a specific image to describe the specific image of metaphor types;Conceptual metaphors are a specific image which used to describe abstract concepts.In chapter four,this paper will talk about the effect of metaphor.In order to achieve the understanding of the world,human need to give a clear order of world.Metaphor is one of the most important efforts,as metaphor can help human make the unfamiliar things to be familiar.Metaphor can help humans to understand nature,to understand other people and understand their own.Although the understanding may be fake as it just a math.But it still is a basic way for human to explore the word.Comprehensive,based on the theory of "similarity" and "conceptual metaphor ",about the essence of metaphor this paper gives some new thinking,and for the classification of metaphor and the effect of metaphor also gives a try.