A Critical Cognitive Analysis Of Gender Metaphor In Modern Chinese Fiction

Gender metaphors may be briefly defined as metaphors in which the conceptual mapping(s) that is (are) projected from the source to the target domain may create and/or reflect some kind of discrimination against women or men. Gender metaphors used in literary works are not merely ornamental linguistic or rhetorical devices, but more importantly, ideological cognitive tool that exploits the readers’ search for cognitive efficiency, often giving rise to covertly discriminatory interpretations.A survey of the researches on gender metaphor shows that on the one hand, most of the related studies are conducted in non-literary genres such as advertising discourse, political discourse, media discourse, etc. On the other hand, the gender metaphor researches carried out in literary discourse are mostly from the perspective of literary criticism, and few are from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis, or Cognitive Linguistics. In such a case, the present thesis attempts to propose a systematic critical cognitive analysis of gender metaphors in literary discourse.The present study mainly aims first to identify gender metaphorical expressions in mainstream literary works during a special historical era (the Republican Era), and then by analyzing gender metaphors via a feminist critical cognitive analysis framework, to reveal the underlying social and cultural ideologies so as to increase the consciousness of readers’ critical reading. In order to achieve these goals, the following research questions are addressed:1. What kinds of gender metaphors are employed to represent women and men?2. How are women and men represented and constructed metaphorically?3. Why are such metaphors used to depict women and men?To answer the above questions, we have adopted a methodology that is embedded in a multidisciplinary theoretical framework pertaining to Critical Discourse Analysis, Cognition Linguistics, and Corpus Linguistics. The present study is based on a self-built corpus of 10 modern Chinese fictions that consists around 1470640 words. The fictions under discussion are among the most representative works of the Republican Era (1912-1949). The study of gender metaphors in these works is rather worthwhile and convincing. The main findings of the study are briefly stated below.First, in modern Chinese fiction, three major gender metaphors are identified, namely cases of metaphorical gender, universal gender metaphor, and cultural gender metaphor. Each of the major gender metaphors covers different layers of sub-types.Second, in the three major gender metaphors, there are both similarities and differences between the conceptualization of women and men. Despite a small amount of symmetrical usage in depicting women and men, in most cases, the gender metaphors under discussion are used to convey men’s power over women, triggering both spatial and cultural discrimination against women.Third, the analysis suggests that in the construction of gender metaphors, besides body context, various other contextual factors, especially the social cultural one, play a significant role. By means of these gender metaphors, modern Chinese fiction construct, transmit and reinforce the ideological vision of women as weak, passive and inanimate, whereas men as strong, active and animate. Therefore, men are superior to women, and women are assumed to be dominated by men.In a nutshell, metaphor is not independent of socio-cultural settings, but metaphor, and thus cognition, is deeply related to our understanding of society and culture. As this study indicates, the asymmetrical usage of gender metaphors constitute the single most important difference in the conceptualization of women and men, and hence in the ideologies about them. A critical cognitive discourse analysis of gender metaphors in literature may be an effective way to dispose the ideological nature of fictions hidden behind the literary or everyday language and to help people to "increase consciousness of how language contributes to the domination of some people by others, because consciousness is the first step towards emancipation" (Fairclough 1989:1).