A Study Of The Conceptual Metaphors In Discourse Coherence In Tess Of The D'Urbervilles

Investigations into metaphor have been booming for decades.Traditionally metaphor study focuses on the fields of rhetoric and linguistics.Over the past two decades metaphor analysis has become increasingly notable in the field of cognitive science.And the influential Conceptual Metaphor Theory put forward by Lakoff and Johnson(1980)reinforces the trend of cognitive study on metaphor.They propose that metaphor plays a basic role in defining the way we perceive the world,the way we think and act to that perceived world.And the systematicity and coherence of conceptual metaphors help enable the metaphorical language to work in a systematic and coherent way.Scholars such as Goatly(1997,2000)and Feng(2004)have paid their attention to the contribution of conceptual metaphors in cohesion and coherence.Yet there are few studies on discourse coherence within a pure English literary material explained by conceptual metaphor theory.This study,therefore,intends to explore the function of conceptual metaphors in discourse coherence within a classic English novel Tess of the D 'Urbervillles(Hardy,2007).This study selects 1018 conceptual metaphors from the novel according to the metaphor identification procedure proposed by Pragglejaz Group(2007).And the metaphors are classified into three types,ontological metaphors,orientational metaphors and structural metaphors.Based on the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor,findings of the study are as follows:Firstly,all three types of metaphors are found in Tess of the D 'Urbervillles,with ontological metaphors being the most frequently used.Secondly,the conceptual metaphors can create local coherence for its systematicity,namely,the systematic mapping from source domain to target domain,the overlapping entailment between source domain and target domain and the close relationships between source domains at deep conceptual level.Thirdly,the global coherence of the novel is achieved for different conceptual metaphors are used coherently by revolving around the motif of the novel.The study indicates that it is of significance to conduct discourse analysis from a cognitive perspective.