Cognitive Study On Emotion Expressing Through Metaphors In Nalan Xingde’s Ci Poems

Born a Manchu blue blood,the poet Nalan Xinge is widely acknowledged as one of the “Three Pillars of the Ci Poetry Circles in the Qing Dynasty.” The restrained ci poems composed by him are sentimental,graceful,and lofty in the pursuit of artistic taste.His ci poetry conveys elegantly and pertinently the common emotions,which are almost experienced by all human beings,but are beyond the expression of many people.Not only was he held in high esteem by his peer literati and literary critics,he was also adored by numerous general readers in his time and of later generations.By returning to the “essence of ci poetry”,Nalan Xingde maximized the function of this ancient rhyming genre in expressing the subtle and delicate feelings surging from one’s heart,and improved its literature status,making great contribution to the renaissance of the ci poetry in the Qing Dynasty.Nalan Ci poetry set in no broad background,but focused on the expression of genuine feelings he experienced in real life.His ci poetry covered in content love,mourning his late wife,friendship,meditation on the past or the Cosmo,the bleak yet magnificent scenery he witnessed during his business trips to the frontiers and so on and so forth.Nalan Xingde nearly spilled his whole sincere heart on papers in refreshing words while voicing his melancholy emotions,which are shared by most people.A critic even had it that “the trace of tenderness in Nalan Ci could make one’s heart twist for 9 times.”Poetry is essentially the language of metaphor,so is the Nalan Ci poetry.This thesis focuses on the emotional content of Nalan Ci poetry,and the role metaphor plays in the emotion expression.Both the metaphorical expressions and the metaphor cognition mechanism deriving from the culture and life experiences would be subjected to the detailed study in this thesis,so as to get a better understanding of how Nalan Ci poetry expresses various touching emotions through metaphor.This study approaches the Nalan Ci poetry from the perspective of metaphor,which is defined in a broad sense in this thesis.The emphasis is placed on the figuring-out of the following questions: What are the frequently recurring metaphors in Nalan Ci poems? What do they suggest? What are their mechanisms? How are they used to convey genuine emotions?This thesis sorts out the frequently recurring metaphorical expressions in 6 major themes of Nalan Ci poems and makes detailed analysis on the connotations,emotion expressing functions and metaphor mechanisms behind them with reference to specific ci poems.The quantitative and qualitative analysis,which is guided by metaphor cognition theories,reveals that there are majorly two categories of metaphors in Nalan Ci poems: the culture code and the idiosyncratic metaphor.The former kind is deeply rooted in Chinese culture while the latter one derives from the living environment and emotion reality of the poet.Culture code can be subdivided into traditional image,allusion,synecdoche and metonymy,while the idiosyncratic metaphor comprises of environment metaphor and grammatical metaphor.Both metaphors are the linguistic manifestations of the metaphorical thoughts closely linked to Chinese culture,personality and experiences of Nalan Xingde,and they contribute jointly to the subtle and genuine emotions expressed in a natural way in Nalan Ci poetry.In the meanwhile,since Nalan Ci poetry depicts the common emotions shared by human beings and some metaphors derive from similar living environment or life experiences,it would be a possible entry point to approach the English rendering of Nalan Ci from the perspective of conveying emotions through metaphors.It is hopefully believed that more sinologists and scholars versed in both classic Chinese and English could work together to render or introduce Nalan Ci outside the boundary of China.