Cognitive-Semantic Approach To Metaphor Understanding

Metaphor is an old and eternal topic. Systematic study on metaphor in the Western world can be traced back to Aristotle. In his two monographs Poetics and Rhetoric, he proposes the comparative view of metaphor and states his main view on metaphor, which covers the nature, the classification, function and working mechanism of metaphor. Then Quintilian puts forward his substitution theory of metaphor. Both are traditional rhetorical studies on metaphor since they both treat metaphor as mainly the deviation of natural language, a figure of speech and a kind of decoration of language. Besides, metaphor is a linguistic phenomenon used for the artistic and rhetorical purposes. This idea has been dominant in metaphor studies in the Western world for 2000 years. However, it has changed since the publication of Lakoff et al.'s Metaphors We Live By. From then on, metaphor studies in the West begin to be of great prosperity and diversity. At present, metaphor has become the necessary topic in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, literature etc. Metaphor is no longer simply a linguistic phenomenon but an instrument of thinking. Lakoff et al.'s conceptual metaphor theory is also a divide in the history of metaphor study. It is CMT that deals with the working mechanism of metaphor in nature for the first time. As far as this theory is concerned, metaphor in nature is some corresponding mappings from the source domain to the target domain. On the basis of CMT, Fauconnier and his colleagues propose another more reasonable theory in the frame of cognitive-semantics, conceptual integration theory/blending theory. This is a four-space model with two input spaces, a generic space and a blended space. The core of this theory is the emergent structure where the novel and new meaning is produced. CIT is a theory which can be employed to illustrate the dynamic meaning construction of natural language, such as metaphor, novel expression, jokes, cartoons, etc. Since CIT is considered the most convincing theory on metaphor interpretation, the present study is conducted to reveal the process of metaphor comprehension on the basis of this theory.The present study is conducted with the aim of elaborating the interpretation of metaphor in the imagery poetry in the frame of CIT.Poetry is the essence of language and furthermore, imagery is the soul of poetry. The appreciation of poetry should be in the terms of the analysis of imagery. However, metaphor and imagery are closely related. The previous studies only study the imagery in poetry from the aesthetic perspective and few of them touch its cognitive function. The thesis makes effort to analyze the imagery in Chinese and English poetry from the cognitive perspective in the frames of CMT and CIT. Then the different interpretations of the same poem will be produced in the different approaches. After a comparison between these two versions of interpretations, a conclusion will be drawn: the comprehension process of a poem is dynamic due to its unique language and complicated images. That is to say, when a new meaning is got in the emergent structure, the four mental spaces and the new meaning can interact further to produce another new meaning. This is critically different from the entrenched structure of CMT. Therefore, CIT is a powerful instrument in interpreting the metaphors in the imagery poetry.