A Cognitive Study On Novel Metaphors In Housing Discourses Of People's Daily

With the establishment of the idea of conceptual metaphor in the 1980 s,metaphor has been promoted from a figure of speech,which has been studied in the western rhetoric for over two thousand years to a rather high level of being a cognitive tool and a methodology.Lakoff(1980)thinks that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon,but also a basis for people's thought and action.The research of metaphor has become a significant study nowadays(Shu Dingfang,2000).In terms of modern cognitive linguistics,metaphor is pervasive and people's conceptual system is basically metaphorical.Though metaphor is usually divided into conventional metaphor and novel metaphor in academic circle,the advent of the conceptual metaphorical theory is based on the everyday speech of people.No wonder previous scholars have paid more attention to the study of conventional metaphor and relatively ignore novel metaphor.Language is closely related to our life.The usage of metaphor in different discourse to some extent reflects the changes and development of social life.In the three decades of housing reform in China,with new problems and situations emerging abundant novel metaphors have showed up in housing discourses with much research significance,such as “house frying”,“lou cuicui”,“house slave”,“house sister”,“snail house” and so on.The thesis has an analysis over seventeen novel metaphors,which appeared in housing discourses of People's Daily from 2005 to 2015.With tenor as the standard of categorization,the novel metaphors will be divided into three categories,namely human-targeted,building-targeted and market-targeted metaphors.In terms of research methodology,what is employed in the thesis is a combination of quantitative and qualitative,diachronic and synchronic studies as well as bottom-up approach to categorize and analyze the novel metaphors.Origin and background,semantic features and cognitive functions of the metaphors will be penetrated respectively.An analysis of these metaphors on one hand provides materials of practical significance for further research in the study of conceptual metaphor,especially enriching the current study of novel metaphor.On the other hand,it promises to enhance people's understanding of some social problems,like soaring property prices and housing bubble,which helps people interpret the housing reform correctly and comprehensively.The thesis consists of the following six chapters.Chapter one serves as a general introduction about the history of metaphor research and the present study,including significance,purpose and methodology of the study as well as the layout of the thesis.Chapter two,the literature review part,firstly provides a detailed explanation of theoretical basis for the study of novel metaphors from the cognitive view(including the previous studies on categorization,semantic features,and cognitive functions of metaphor).Then a summarization of research on housing issues is provided as well as the previous studies on metaphors in housing discourses at home and abroad.Chapter three to Chapter five is the body part of the thesis.The three chapters are divided according to the tenor of the novel metaphors appeared in housing discourses.There are mainly three categories,namely human-targeted metaphors,building-targeted metaphors and market-targeted metaphors.Representative novel metaphorical utterances are chosen to be analyzed from a multidimensional perspective.Every chapter starts with a statistical analysis and static description of the novel metaphors.Then the detailed analyses of the metaphors are unfolded from three aspects: origin and background,analyses of semantic features and analyses of cognitive functions.Chapter six presents the findings of the study and limitations and suggestions for further research are also given at the end of the thesis.