A Megametaphoric Analysis Of Chuang Tzu's "Xiao-Yao-You"

The study of metaphor can be traced back to the period of ancient Greece, when metaphor was considered an ornamental device used in rhetoric. However, with the development of cognitive linguistics, especially after the publication of Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), metaphor is actually a pervasive phenomenon in everyday language, which constrains or even defines the way we think, reason, and argue. It is now often taken as a powerful tool for our conceptualization of abstract categories by means of cross-domain mappings (Ungerer & Schmid, 1996). Werth (1994 & 1999) holds a similar point of view about this. At the same time, he also points out that most linguistic approaches to metaphor only provide sentential-level accounts of the phenomenon. The fact is that, quite often, there is an entire metaphorical undercurrent running through a whole text, which may contribute a lot to the revelation of the text theme. Werth terms it megametaphor. Therefore, under the framework of Text World Theory, Werth suggests a megametaphoric reading of a whole text, and thus advances the Theory of Megametaphor as a complement to or further development of Lakoff's Conceptual Metaphor Theory.Typical of the representative works of Chuang Tzu,"Xiao-Yao-You"("Wandering in Absolute Freedom") is so metaphorically engaging that it often leads to a diversity of interpretations. However, having a bird's eye view of these interpretations, none is made from the cognitive linguistic perspective. Therefore, the present author attempts to conduct a megametaphoric analysis of Chuang Tzu's"Xiao-Yao-You"with a view to offering a new way of interpreting this text. After scrutinizing four typical journey scenarios in the text, an implicit megametaphoric innuendo that sustains from the beginning to the end gradually surfaces. It is THE PURSUIT OF TAO IS THE JOURNEY TO THE INFINITE SPHERE. Undoubtedly, this is the megametaphor of"Xiao-Yao-You", through which the abstract domain of Tao is expected to be understood in terms of another familiar and concrete domain, i.e. JOURNEY in this case. As a result, the text becomes an organic whole, and the Taoist...