A Study On The Textual Coherent Function Of Conceptual Metaphor In Postgraduates' English Writing

Conceptual metaphor was first proposed by Lakoff &Johnson(1980).In recent years,many scholars at home and abroad have been studying metaphor not only in terms of vocabulary and grammar,but also in terms of discourse.Listening,speaking,reading,writing and translation are the five basic English skills,where writing is usually considered as a comprehensive expression of learners' English proficiency.However,second language learners still have many problems with their second language writing,such as loose and illogical structure,incoherent meaning and non-clear theme.Writer's vocabulary,syntax and so on are factors that affect the quality of writing,but writer's way of thinking and cognition affect the level of writing in a larger extent since thinking affects the wording and syntax of discourse,even the coherence of discourse.Therefore,conceptual metaphors closely related to English writing.So far,researches on the conceptual metaphor and discourse coherence of English writing have taken up a large proportion,but those study mainly focused on undergraduates and high school students,not involved postgraduates.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,this paper was based on conceptual metaphor theory and combined with its philosophical basis,working mechanisms,systematicity and coherence to explore the consciousness of conceptual metaphor and the discourse coherence of conceptual metaphor in postgraduates' English writings.More specifically,to explore how to construct the coherence of English writing through conceptual metaphor.This paper applied quantitative analysis as well as qualitative methods.Quantitative analysis was mainly used for the analysis of the reliability and validity of questionnaire,which chose 180 postgraduates of non-English majors of three classes of liberal arts in first grade from Harbin Normal University as subjects.While the corpus,which was made up of 30 English compositions written by postgraduates of non-English majors of liberal arts whose English score was above 50 points in the Graduate Candidate Test(GCT),applied qualitative analysis.After the analysis of questionnaire,this paper found that postgraduates could use conceptual metaphor but could not distinguish specific classifications of conceptual metaphors at the sentence level.There was a small amount of postgraduates who could use conceptual metaphor at the discourse level.Through the analysis of the corpus,this paper found that in these 30 articles using conceptual metaphor at the discourse level,coherent discourse constructed by conceptual metaphor was only a very small proportion in every articles.And the coherent discourse constructed by conceptual metaphor in this 30 articles was from three aspects: coherence within one conceptual metaphor,coherence between two conceptual metaphors and coherence among multiple conceptual metaphors.Study on the postgraduates' consciousness of conceptual metaphor and their construction modes of achieving textual coherent by conceptual metaphor in postgraduates' English writing has both theoretical and practical significance.On the one hand,this paper can theoretically enrich the study on second language writing from the perspective of cognitive and study on textual functions of conceptual metaphor.On the other hand,this paper can practically enlighten second language teachers introduce conceptual metaphor to postgraduates,and enhance postgraduates' consciousness of achieving discourse coherence by conceptual metaphor.