Cohesive And Coherent Functions Of Conceptual Metaphor At Discourse Level

Metaphor has been studied from different perspectives from Aristotle's time to the present. With the development of natural science and social science, people have gradually come to understand the essential characters of metaphor. Researching approaches and fruits from other academic fields like philosophy, semantics, pragmatics, psychology and cognitive science have been adopted into the study of metaphor, which helps people reach closer and closer to the essence of metaphor that is covered by linguistic expressions. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) put forward the cognitive approach to the study of metaphor in their book Metaphors We Live By and they argue that metaphor can constitute basic schemas by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world. Therefore, metaphor can play an important role in our understanding of language and the world we describe through language.Metaphor in the cognitive linguistic view means primarily conceptual metaphor, as opposed to linguistic metaphor (K(o|¨)vecses, 2002:29). Within the cognitive framework, conceptual metaphor studies have been successfully done concerning its nature, types, and characteristics. However, the textual functions of conceptual metaphor, such as cohesion and coherence, are neglected by scholars. Studies show that discourses are filled with metaphors. They could be as long as complete works, or as short as a sentence, and all of them consist of metaphorical expressions. Conceptual metaphor theories provides a foothold from which people can observe the internal structure of a discourse deeply and by which discourse study and cognitive study can be combined with each other. In fact, the use of conceptual metaphor in discourse can contribute to cohesion and coherence of discourse and make discourse more vivid and much easier to understand. The purpose of this thesis is to apply insights from the contemporary theory of conceptual metaphor to the analysis of the cohesive and coherent functions of conceptual metaphor in discourse.The thesis is a theoretical explication of the nature, types, characteristics of conceptual metaphor, and the contribution of conceptual metaphor to textual cohesion and coherence. Conceptual metaphor is by nature a systematic and coherent thinking pattern, which is affected largely by people's cognitive ability and the cultural and traditional factors around them. At the same time, the relevant context required in generating the conceptual metaphors is systematic and coherent too. Therefore, as the representative of the interrelation between different conceptual domains, conceptual metaphor is able to determine the coherence of surface language expressions from the deeper level of concept. Governed by metaphors, metaphorical expressions tend to be used systematically in groups and by interacting with each other they form a cohesive network at the surface level of a text. Under this cohesive network of metaphorical expressions, there is the underlying coherent system of conceptual metaphors, associated with the topic and the development of the topic and contributing to coherence at the deep level of a text.