Study Of Human-related Metaphors In A Dream Of Red Mansions:A Cognitive Approach

Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a merely figure of speech and the deviation of lexical meanings.Conceptual metaphor theory claims that metaphor is not simply as a rhetoric device of language but is associated with mankind's cognitive process as it reflects the relation between language,thought and cognition.Conceptual integration theory,a further development of mental space theory,regards mental space as the basic unit in cognitive process.A typical conceptual integration network includes four mental spaces,namely,two input spaces,a generic space and a blending space respectively.Conceptual integration theory holds that people constructs a variety of mental spaces when talking and thinking,and that those mental spaces are blended into an integration space to generate an emergent structure.The common points between the two are that conceptual integration and conceptual metaphor are both not purely linguistic phenomena,but rather a way of thinking and cognitive means,and the systematic mappings between the two domains are also involved.However,Conceptual integration theory focuses more on the explanation of creative thinking activities and newly or temporarily-generated conceptual structures,and can be used to explain most of the cognitive phenomena of language.Under the framework of conceptual metaphor theory,the present study,taking "human" as the general concept of the target domain,attempts to make a detailed classification and analysis of the metaphors collected in A Dream of Red Mansions.According to K?vecses(2002),metaphors can be classified into two main systems,one is the Great Chain of Being metaphor,and the other is the Event Structure metaphor.Results demonstrate that the concepts of the target domain in the Great Chain of Being metaphor system involve eight categories: human being,human appearance,human behavior,life,career,status,human emotions,human relationship.Yet the concepts of the target domain in the event structure system mainly include two types: human relationship and human actions.It was also found that the corresponding concepts in the source domain for the concepts of the target domain involve animal,plant,entity,food,container,orientation,taste,journey,liquid etc..In addition to the above two main metaphor systems,there are still some novel metaphors,such as analogy,hyperbole,religious metaphors etc..Based on Gills Fauconnier and Mark Turner's conceptual integration theory,the present study also attempts to interpret and analyze the dynamic meaning construction of some metaphors that beyond what conceptual metaphor can explain.Furthermore,conceptual integration theory,compared with conceptual metaphor theory,was found to has its own advantages in the interpretation of meaning construction.Integration is a dynamic process,in which the activation of background knowledge and cognitive inference activities are deemed essential and fundamental.And an emergent structure that does not exist in the original input spaces will be finally formed in the integration space.Cognitive meaning construction is mainly conducted in emergent structure,and the formation of the structure is a cognitive process in which composition,completion and elaboration are needed in the course of construction.