A Study On The Metaphors In Farewell Poems In Tang Dynasty From Cognitive Perspective

The Tang Dynasty was the heyday of the development of ancient China and was also a glorious period for the development of Chinese poetry,of which the farewell poems accounted for a large proportion in Tang poetry.The farewell poems in Tang Dynasty are not only numerous but also full of emotions.They can reflect the humanities,nature and social status of the Tang Dynasty in a comprehensive way.There are many studies on the Farewell poetry in the Tang Dynasty,but only a few on the metaphors in them and less on metaphors from the perspective of cognition.However,metaphor is closely related to poetry.It can be said that poetry is an important carrier of metaphors.The use of metaphors is an important means of poetry construction.Farewell poetry contains a large number of metaphors.Cognitive linguistics views human thinking as being metaphorical.Metaphor exists in people's daily life,language,thought and behavior.It is used as a conceptual cognitive tool to understand things and the outside world through the mapping from one conceptual domain to another.It allows people to conceptualize complex and abstract things through mapping a simple and concrete source domain onto a complex and abstract target domain.Analyzing the cognitive process of conceptual metaphors can better understand metaphors,thus helping foreigners interested in Chinese classical culture understand and appreciate the poetry in Tang Dynasty better.Based on conceptual metaphor theory,the thesis conducts a qualitative study on major metaphors in the 1322 farewell poems in Tang Dynasty based on two research questions: 1.What are the major conceptual metaphors in the farewell poems in Tang Dynasty? 2.What is the cognitive process behind these conceptual metaphors?This thesis views the metaphors that appear more than three times in corpus as major metaphors and all major metaphors are classified into four categories: life metaphors,society metaphors,fame metaphors and emotion metaphors.It can be found that poets tend to simplify and concretize complex and abstract concepts in the cognitive process in order to better express and be understood.That is,poets use one thing to understand another thing based on their physical experience and interactional experience with the outside world.Human beings are usually understood and expressed based on poets' experience of the world.Specifically,poets clearly conceptualize human beings themselves based on their knowledge of animals,plants,and certain substances in the natural world.In addition,the abstract social environment and fame are expressed based on poets' perception of specific substances.Based on the perception of visible natural phenomena,poets' abstract emotion is clearly expressed.These metaphors not only reveal the living conditions of poets and their friends,but also contain their courage to their leaving friends and the frustration with their unrealistic aspirations.Besides,the cognitive process implied by major metaphors shows the stereotype of the people living in Tang Dynasty that officialdom is the natural outlet for good scholars and the influence of the highly centralized feudalism on the literati's political future.In short,the cognitive analysis of the major metaphors in the farewell poem in Tang Dynasty is helpful to deepen the understanding of such kind of poems,thus promoting the study and dissemination of Chinese classical culture.