A Cognitive Study Of Metaphors In Mao Zedong's Poetry

Metaphor is for most people a device of the rhetorical flourish.Furthermore,metaphor is typically regarded as characteristic of language alone,a matter of words rather than thought or action.According to Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory,metaphors are fundamentally conceptual in nature,metaphorical language is secondary(Lakoff and Johnson 1980:272).Metaphor pervades our normal conceptual system.Beeause so many of the concepts that mean a lot to us are either abstract or not clearly described in our experience(the emotions,ideas,time,etc.),we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we comprehend in clearer terms(spatial orientation,objects,etc.).The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.The innovation and novelty in poetry are not miraculous,they do not come out of nowhere.They are built using the tools of everyday metaphorical thought,as well as other commonplace conceptual mechanisms(Gibbs,R.1994).Mao Zedong was a poet as well as a revolutionist.As the saying goes,“Poetry expresses genuine feelings." Every line or every episode in Mao Zedong's poems portrays some soul-stirring,heroic deeds of the Chinese people in their revolutionary struggles.In the west,there is the word"epic",Mao Zedong's poetical writings,in their entirety,deserve to be called a spectacular epic of the Chinese revolution(??? 2004).His poetical writings now form a part of the cultural heritage of our nation and even become gems in world literature,their impact on the present world is enormous(??? 2000).This thesis intends to study the metaphors in Mao Zedong's poetry from cognitive perspective.Inspired by Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory,the author has found a large number of metaphors in Mao Zedong's poetry through elaborative study on his 67 poems.According to the subject of these metaphors,they can be categorized into six groups:Chinese Communist Party metaphors(e.g.+CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY IS THE PLUM BLOSSOM+),revolution metaphors(e.g.+REVOLUTION IS DARING TO MOVE THE SUN AND THE MOON TO NEW SKIES+),emotion metaphors(e.g.+PARTING IS A HOOKLIKE WANING MOON+),anti-China forces metaphors(e.g.+ANTI-CHIINA FORCES ARE PAPER TIGERS+),old China metaphors(e.g.+OLD CHINA WAS A LONG NIGHT+),time Metaphors(e.g.+THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS ARE A FILLIP+).Then the author makes a detailed analysis of the working mechanism of these metaphors on the basis of correlations between the target domain and the source domain.This thesis is an attempt to analyze classical Chinese poetry with Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory.It can make a contribution to the appreciation,translation and dissemination of traditional Chinese culture.At the same time,it offers the cross-culture evidence for the existence of conceptual metaphor theory from the corpus of Chinese language and culture(??? 2009).