Lakoff's Theory Of Metaphor

Since Aristotle,metaphors have been narrowly considered as subjects of research in marginal subjects such as rhetoric for a long time,and it is precisely for this reason that the traditional theory of metaphor also regards metaphor as only a kind of rhetoric.Since the 1970 s,the study of metaphor theory took the turn of linguistics and the wave of philosophy of mind quickly attracted the attention of linguists and linguistic philosophers,but within the scope of the study of language philosophy,the study of metaphor still remains.It is relatively narrow and has not made much progress until the involvement of cognitive linguistics brought about an academic upsurge of metaphor theory.Even this metaphorical trend has spread to many humanities and social sciences,and has become the target and motif of many research directions.Although there was inevitably a large bubble in this boom,a great deal of interdisciplinary research on metaphor was born at one time.It was also an unprecedented event.The iconic figure was George Lakoff.Lakoff's metaphorical theory is systematically interpreted in the book “The Metaphor We Live on.” The purpose of Lakoff's writing is to answer the metaphorical theories of Davidson and Searle.Both Davidson and Searle's metaphorical theory are partly based on the theory of truth-valued conditional semantics.The difference between Davidson and Searle is that Davidson believes that metaphor based semantic theory cannot be interpreted.Searle thinks that metaphorical sentences can be interpreted literally through the framework of Grice's pragmatic principles.Lakoff opposed Davidson and Searle's view of metaphor.Lakoff thinks that metaphor involves the human conceptual system.He believes that his metaphor theory will affect our understanding of the conceptual system.Lakoff divides metaphors into three categories: orientational metaphors,ontological metaphors,and structural metaphors.Orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors are spontaneous,and structural metaphors are constructed by orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors.Metaphor is not an isolated linguistic phenomenon.Metaphor is a systematic conceptual construction.In order to more systematically solve the features of metaphorical construction concepts,Lakoff introduced interactive attributes and prototype to illustrate that metaphor is not an isolated linguistic phenomenon but a systematic gestalt construction.Lakoff emphasized the use of interactive attributes to improve the definition of objective intrinsic attributes,and introduced Rosch's prototype theory to improve the concept of set theory.