A Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Pride And Prejudice

Jane Austen's masterpiece Pride and Prejudice is diffusely viewed as one of the most welcome novels all over the world for its vivid depictions of characters and distinctive language style.Since its publication in 1813,According to the author's literature research,previous scholars have conducted a lot of meticulous researches on this novel,and have achieved fruitful research results.However,the previous researches mainly focus on the literary genre,the theme of the novel and its influence on other authors.The perspective of cognitive linguistics have seldom been studied by scholars.In Pride and Prejudice,Jane Austen uses some conceptual metaphors to make the novel more vivid and realistic.With a history of more than two thousand years,western metaphor studies have formed a consistent system of research since Aristotle,during which a great number of celebrated scholars have emerged.And the contemporary metaphor study,especially the conceptual metaphor put forward by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson book Metaphors We Live By,has endowed metaphors with new connotations in their book Metaphors We Live By in the 1980s:metaphor is not only a rhetoric device in the traditional sense,but also a way of thinking,which plays a significant role in people's daily lives.The study is undertaken to investigate the three fundamental spatial concepts conveyed by AT,ON and IN with the purpose of finding out their specific metaphorical extensions in Jane Austin's English novel,examining the distribution frequencies of their various metaphorical extensions.This study is conducted from the theoretical perspective of conceptual metaphor theory,its classification and working mechanism proposed by Lakoff and Johnson(1980).The research questions to be answered in the study are as follows:(1)The specific metaphorical extensions of the three concepts AT,ON and IN in Jane Austin's English novels.(2)The various metaphorical extensions of AT,ON and IN distribute in the target domains.Based on the analysis of the collected data,this study yields two main findings as follows:(1)AT,ON and IN are used to structure the same target domains,namely,STATE,EVENT,TIME and QUANTITY,with the former two constituting large proportions of all the metaphorical extensions and the latter two constituting smaller proportions.(2)AT,ON and IN are used to carry metaphorical meanings.The pedagogical implications lie in the following aspects:(1)It proves that the coherence of theme can be achieved by the application of conceptual metaphors,which enlarges the research scope of metaphor and provides a new perspective for discourse analysis.(2)The analysis of conceptual metaphors in Pride and Prejudice provides an alternative choice for the teaching and learning of literary works and enables people to appreciate literary works better from a different perspective.(3)An analysis like this will facilitate the teaching and learning of the target language because it can deepen students,' understanding of the cognitive function of spatial metaphors and sharpen their metaphorical awareness in English learning.