| Postgraduate Ouyang LirongSupervisors Professor Zhou Quanliu Professor Chen JitangMetaphor is a widely and frequently used rhetoric device. It's quite a long time since metaphors abounded in rhetoric, especially found in the literature not only in western countries but also in China. As we know, metaphor is based on the association of people, but it can't be described lively without colorful associations. The signified and the signifier in a metaphor are so closely related that they should at least have one similarity in such respects as characteristics, functions, shapes, and actions. How people create a metaphor is based on what they want. For this reason, multidimensional associations of metaphor result from their multi-quality factors.Many scholars have brought to light that metaphor is indeed closely connected with associations. Its reflective meaning stems from the sense of words and also from the convention of humanity. But all meanings from associations are fettered by the factors of specific customs and cultural background no matter where they stem from. We can randomly find metaphors in semantic structures but we can't readily grasp their reflective meanings without knowing their cultural connotations. In this sense, a metaphor is rooted in a certain culture. Therefore, Metaphor and Culture, in Part II of the thesis will be discussed and explained by employing color terms for the correlation between metaphor and culture. It's clear that different metaphors based on different cultural backgrounds carry specific cultural connotations. From the reason, if you learn a foreign language or translate it, you'd better do some researches' in the cultural background of the target language, for example, students leaning English may have come across the sentence like this: "You chicken!" The students may be puzzled what this sentence means unless they know that the word chicken has the metaphorical meaning of a coward, a person without courage. Something similar may happen to an English-speaking person when he learns the Chinese '%~~P~". Infact, "jt~" in Chinese me~ns stupid, incompetent, good-for-nothing rather than what English refers to.Since Lakoff and Johnson published their creative book---- Metaphors We Live By, the study of metaphor has entered into a wonderful period. As Lakoff observed: "We have found that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." From then on, being an extension of familiar retorical device metaphor has been regarded as a concept( i.e. metaphorical concept) going far beyond its rhetorical boundary. And cognitive linguists set out to combine metaphor with linguistic analysis. Something similar happens to philosophers, psychologists. Can association also be applied to cognitive linguistics just as it can be to the metaphor being a rhetoric. The answer is positive. The association will play an important role in cognitive linguistics. In the field of cognitive liguistics, it is the association of metaphor that operates between domains in the directions:from external to internal and from concrete to abstract. Part III The Extension of Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics concentrates on the extension of metaphor in cognitive linguistics, dealing with semantic changes happening to the English sense-perception verbs, It is proved that systematic metaphorical forces help to bring about the mappings of the vocabulary of physical perception onto theiiivocabulary of internal self and internal sensations. These mappings are not random correspondences, but highly motivated links between parallel or analogous areas of physical and internal sensations. For this reason, there naturally appear such phenomena: see sometimes means "know" and hear comes to mean "obey".By comparison of sense-perception verbs between English and Chinese, we can discover that the expressions of "vision" in English, expressions with metaph...
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