A Cognitive Study On Metaphors Of Human And His Body Parts And Possessions In Fortress Besieged

The study of metaphor can be traced back to Greek two thousand years ago. In Aristotle's theory, metaphor is a comparison between two things which occurs only at the lexical level. Metaphor is regarded a language deviant and requires much effort in acquisition. Aristotle's metaphor theory dominated the studies on metaphor for more than two thousand years. In the year of 1980, American cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson published their landmark book Metaphor We Live By. Their Conceptual Metaphor Theory greatly changed the direction of metaphor researches.This thesis tries to make an empirical study on metaphors of human, human body parts and possessions in Fortress Besieged by chiefly exploiting Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The research focuses on the mappings in which HUMAN, human BODY PARTS and POSSESSIONS (including the inalienable and alienable) are both used as the TARGET domains or the SOURCE domains, however, mainly on the former type. For that the author of the thesis holds the view that self-recognition is of the primitive importance in human conceptualization system.The study reviews that among the occurrence of those domains, there is a high tendency for people to employ ANIMATE THINGS in the metaphors of HUMAN, HUMAN BODY PARTS and HUMAN POSSESSIONS. Among the INANIMATE THINGS, the use of CONCRETE things or objects either as the source domain or the target normally far outnumbers the ABSTRACT thing or concepts. This thesis also finds out that there exist a certain amount of metaphors that may not be in perfect accordance with Conceptual Metaphor Theory. There exist some metaphorical mappings where lots of concrete entities are conceptualized in terms of those abstract concepts, ideas or principles, which seems to have violated Lakoff's claims that the essence of metaphor is to understand and comprehend abstract things or concepts in terms of concrete entities. Besides, some basic culture modes underlying those conceptual metaphors are also analyzed, plus a brief contrastive study between Chinese and English cultures.