Metaphor: A Bridge From Eye To Mind

Metaphor has been studied and theorized about by linguists, psychologists and philosophers for a long history of over two millennia. The linguistic research on it witnessed three periods of development from rhetoric, semantic to cognitive perspective. Presently metaphor is a focus in various academic fields, which is called metaphor mania by Johnson. Metaphor becomes metaphorology.Traditionally metaphor is viewed as a rhetorical and stylistic device utilized as an embellishment in poetry and great writings. Since 1970s, cognitive research demonstrates that metaphor is ubiquitous. It infiltrates many aspects of everyday speech, and most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. The working mechanism of metaphor is cross-domain mapping. All the conventionalized metaphors are rooted in bodily experience and instantiated in language.Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and previous researches, this dissertation first constructs a theoretical framework called"metaphor tree", which is a hierarchical diagram composed of five levels: culture--embodied experience--image schema--conceptual metaphor-- metaphorical expressions from bottom to top.With the guidance of this framework, this research proceeds a systematic investigation on an inventory of data collected from English and Chinese, including vision perceptual organ(目,眼睛,eye, etc), vision physical condition(光,light,etc), vision perceptual process(看,视,见,look,see,etc). Many of them are fairly mundane utterances, such as"I see what you're saying",'This paragraph is murky","眼明心亮","心目"etc. This research discovers that the meanings of the underlined words or idioms are extended from the literal description of vision to cognition or emotion. The underlying conceptual metaphor is EYE IS MIND, which is derived from the embodied experience that vision perception system is the primary channel whereby human beings obtain the knowledge about the world. Just as Aristotle said,"All originate from eyes."So metaphor is a main motivation force behind the semantic evolution and extention. It links language, mind and body, and it also builds the bridge from eye to mind.Exploring deeply, it is further discovered that the Chinese and English data involved in metaphorical mapping manifest great similarities, at the same time display some differences. The...