A Cognitive Analysis Of Poetic Metaphors In A Dream Of Red Mansions: Two Cases

As the most magnificent classic novel all through the Chinese literature history,A Dream of Red Mansions has attracted surprising attentions from people in various fields with its remarkable artistic achievement and profound cultural deposits.An overview of Hong academic research over more than two hundred years reveals that most researches concentrate on social aspect,historical aspect and literary aspect.With regard to the part of poetry,which plays a significant role in suggesting the fates,characteristics and even moods of the characters in A Dream of Red Mansions,few achievements on the basis of linguistic theories have been made,especially from the perspective of cognitive research of metaphor.In addition,owing to the barriers in both culture and language,the academic field abroad has done little work in the cognitive research on poetic metaphors in A Dream of Red Mansions.From cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives,with the traditional Chinese literary classic as corpus,this thesis aims to solve the problems confronted by cognitive metaphorical research on the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Idealized Cognitive Models(ICMs): the universality and relativity of the conceptual metaphor.It mainly addresses the following issues:Can we prove the universality of cognitive language view through examining the corpus extracted from the Chinese classic literature? What are the similarities and dissimilarities of the metaphorical cognitive system between English and Chinese? What are the motivations for the differences? Moreover,this thesis presents a contrastive study of poems extracted from the Chinese literary classic A Dream of Red Mansions and its translation works.Two case studies have been done in the thesis,which respectively analyzes WRITING ABOUT THE CHRYSANTHEMUM(《(咏菊)》)and All GOOD THINGS MUST END(《好了歌》)within a cognitive linguistic framework,so that three conclusions are made:Firstly,there do exist a universal metaphorical system;secondly,due to the differences in racial and cultural background, conceptual cognitive systems in English and Chinese may be under certain circumstances;thirdly,the metaphorical research and the cultural research are closely connected and supplement each other.Therefore,this research may be of great help to understand the Chinese traditional culture as well as to promote the cultural communication between the West and the East.