A Study On The Nobel Presentation Speech In Literature Under The Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Cognitive linguistics has made a great step in the 1980s since Lakoff and Johnson published the book Metaphors We Live By.Scholars' vision on metaphor has been gradually expanded and its vital importance to human language and cognition has been enhanced.In recent years,those studies made on public speech under the conceptual metaphor theory concentrate more on the political speech while the other speeches are seldom involved.As a speech on special occasion,the presentation speech,in compact and clear logic,is acknowledged as an effective way to approach the spirit and standards of awards.The value of the works,awarding tendency and those abstract literary concepts,illustrated by the conceptual metaphor in the Nobel presentation speech in literature become the focus of this study.Integrated with the documentary analysis method and the qualitative analysis method,this thesis will give an analysis on the 390 samples collected from 50 Nobel presentation speeches in literature from three aspects which includes orientation metaphor,ontological metaphor and structure metaphor.It is also subscribed to elaborate on the distribution and function of each type of conceptual metaphor found in the data.The research process will be supported by the "source domain" and "target domain",two core elements of the conceptual metaphor within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory.From 11 types of conceptual metaphors found in the data,it can be drawn that plenty of conceptual metaphors exist in the Nobel presentation speech in literature with each type presented by one or more metaphorical expressions.In addition,the abstract concepts in the Nobel presentation speech such as literature,writing style,culture,idea,and external climate interpreted through six different types of conceptual metaphors can help the audience have a better understanding of this prize,the winner's work and their different writing style.The studies also show that these metaphors,deeply entrenched in the presentation speech,play five basic functions which can be specified as below.(1)Orientation metaphor plays its significant role in catching the spirit of Nobel Prize in literature;(2)Entity and substance metaphor conceptualizes those abstract concepts concerning literature;(3)Container metaphor suggests time constraints of this prize along with the awarding reason;(4)Personification metaphor enhances the vividness and vitality in language;(5)Structure metaphor,in terms of concept and knowledge about journey and war,conceptualizes the writing process of the prize winner.In this thesis,there are two aspects of findings.Firstly,the spirit of the award and judges' consideration reflected by conceptual metaphors are refined by the analysis of a large amount of corpus,in order to be helpful for furtherance of research on Nobel presentation speech in literature;Secondly,the research result verify the explaining and constructing functions of conceptual metaphor through the actual context,which provides us a broad perspective to make further study on the function of conceptual metaphors.