An Analysis Of Cognitive Motivations To Chinese Metaphoric Compounds

The arbitrariness and motivation of the words have long been controversial since these two concepts were put forward by Saussure. With the booming of cognitive linguistics in the 1980's, people become no longer satisfied with the description of morphology of the words, but endeavor to explore its underlying cognitive motivations. In this thesis, we are going to take a cognitive perspective to study the motivations to the metaphoric compounds with a view to accounting for their word formation and morphological structures.The first chapter is a general survey to the study of the metaphor and metaphoric words. It reviews the research history of the metaphor and the traditional metaphoric compound study of word formation and morphology, and introduces their swerve towards cognitive study under the influence of cognitive linguistics.Metaphor is not only a cognitive tool of human beings, but also an important word formation approach in Chinese. The word formation of metaphoric compounds is motivated by various factors like culture, language and human cognition, etc.. In the second chapter, the motivations to the word formation of metaphoric compounds are mainly discussed from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Metaphoric compounds can be applied to facilitate the understanding of abstract concepts, or to categorize the world with metaphoric attributes. Besides, metaphoric compounds can also be applied to fill in the lexical gap, economize the language or add vividness to the language.