Analysis Of Metaphors In Bob Dylan's Lyrics From The Perspective Of Cognitive Poetics

The 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature was ultimately attributed to the well-known American folk singer and lyricist Bob Dylan.This news has aroused widespread concern and discussion in both the literary and critic circles.Many people can not accept that Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature,because they think that literature is limited to novels,essays,and etc.,so the lyrics do not belong to literature.Li Jingze,deputy chairman and literary critic of the Chinese Writers Association,said: “Bob Dylan's works are literature,to be precise,they are poetry.” And on account of Dylan's winning,many scholars began to study Bob Dylan's lyrics.However,their researches are limited to the literary nature of the lyrics,the artistic features of the lyrics,and the influence of his lyrics on American music.The author believes that Bob Dylan's ability to win the Nobel Prize for Literature is inextricably linked to the rich metaphors contained in his lyrics.This article will analyze the metaphors in the lyrics of Bob Dylan from the perspective of cognitive poetics,and tackle three questions: First,how to use cognitive poetics to interpret the lyrics of Bob Dylan? Second,what kind of metaphors do Bob Dylan's lyrics have? Last,what functions do metaphorical languages of Bob Dylan's lyrics have?This article chooses Bob Dylan's lyrics as the object of metaphor research because domestic scholars have published hundreds of articles on metaphor research.However,few people use lyrics as corpus for analysis.Due to space limitations,this article randomly selects 100 lyrics of Bob Dylan's total 400 lyrics as the research corpus since his debut.The article consists of five parts.First,the background,objective and significance of the study are briefly introduced.Then it summarizes the previous research on cognitive poetics,metaphor and Bob Dylan's lyrics.The third part is the theoretical foundation,namely cognitive poetics theory and metaphor theory.The fourth part,the most important part,analyzes metaphors in the lyrics of Bob Dylan from the perspective of cognitive poetics,and illustrates the functions of metaphors in Bob Dylan's lyrics.Finally,it summarizes the findings and limitations.Then based on the theory of cognitive poetics and conceptual metaphor,the author analyzes the Bob Dylan's lyrics.The following conclusions are drawn.First,Metaphor is an important method for expressing abstract concepts of Bob Dylan's song lyrics.Second,in the corpus composed of lyrics of Bob Dylan's total around 400 songs,100 songs are randomly picked up to be analyzed.The major source domains of conceptual metaphors include: journey,human,entity,war,emotion and political metaphors.Third,Bob Dylan's lyrics in this thesis are regarded as the poetry,and the author uses the cognitive poetics and mainly conceptual metaphors studies to analyze the metaphorical languages in Bob Dylan's lyrics,which shows that metaphors in lyrics can be interpreted by cognitive poetics.Last,Bob Dylan's lyrics are full of metaphors,which help Bob Dylan better expresses his own emotions and understanding vividly.There are three metaphorical functions,that is,emotional function,cognitive function and aesthetic function.