A Review Of Lakoff's Conceptual Metaphor Theory

This dissertation is to give a review of the conceptual metaphor theory that rose at the beginning of the 1980's, analyzing its theoretical background, main ideas, significance and other scholars' criticisms on it.The dissertation is composed of six parts. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, the author comes to a historical account of metaphor in Chapter 2, including the form of traditional theory of metaphor and its Philosophical basis of objectivism, Richards and Black's development of metaphor theory in modern times and the beginning of cognitive turn in metaphor study.The third part consists of four aspects of conceptual metaphor, including its definition, philosophical basis, feature and mechanism. Conceptual metaphor is the systematic metaphorical thinking underlying everyday expression, based on our experience, which is a product of our body or interaction between ourselves and the environment. Conceptual metaphor works through cross-domain mapping, following the Invariance Principle and Target Domain Overrides principle.The fourth part tries to apply the conceptual metaphor theory to L2 vocabulary teaching, focusing on its significance in explaining the implications of words. The author concludes that conceptual metaphor is helpful and necessary for the students to get a better memorization and understanding of new words.Other scholars' criticisms on conceptual metaphor theory are examined in the fifth part. The criticisms can be attributed to different standing points of study: Lakoff takes a diachronic approach while the critics take a synchronic approach.The last part is a summary and some topics for further study are suggested.