A Tentative Study Of English Animal Metaphor: Cognitive Perspectives

Since the publication of Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson, the second-generation cognitive science zealously promoting embodied philosophy has had a great influence on human'basic understanding of the world. We begin to doubt whether the things we know are literal and corresponding to the internal reality or to what they really are. However, from cognitive perspectives, our understanding of the world is experiential and metaphorical. It can be mapped from one conceptual domain to another, and also, the human thought is based on metaphor. Language is the overall scope of cognition, reflecting social, cultural, psychological, communicative interactions, and only by acquisition, cognitive development and mental process can it be understood. So more and more scholars became interested in cognitive studies concerning about language, culture etc., and published a lot of writings.The Great Chain of Being Metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Turner in 1989 enables us to understand human characters and behaviors by taking animals as the reference. K?vecses (2002) holds the view that there is only one way to achieve the meaning entrenchment of animal metaphor. That is to give human characteristics to the animals, and then give them back to human. However, the transformation and understanding will seldom be conducted successfully without our further discussion and evolvement of the cognitive models.The traditional approach handles metaphor mostly from the cultural perspective; this thesis will adopt a different approach which begins from the perspectives of cognition and language philosophy and traces back to provide arguments to the claim that metaphor is everywhere in our life. Meanwhile, improvement is going to be made of Fauconnier and Turner's Blending Theory and a new cognitive model of EBT is going to be proposed. At last, the feasibility of EBT is going to be tested by applying it to the Aves from Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2002).This thesis mainly focuses on the following four aspects: First, things'exterior representations vary all the time, but are subject to the jurisdiction of their interior structures, so although there are two totally different things, we can also find their similarities. This provides possibilities for the claim that metaphor is everywhere in our life. Second, the entrenchment of animal metaphor, besides the cultural factor, is no more the diachronic result of the human's cognition. Third, from the importance of the human's cognition, BT lacks the cognitive process of the two subjects: the metaphor user and metaphor acceptor, so the meditation space and the assessment space are attached to both sides of the inputs in BT respectively to emphasize that the animal metaphor can be put to use and understood, to a large extent, because the two subjects have the same thought or share the same experience, thus EBT is proposed.Forth, word frequency is introduced to substantiate the feasibility of EBT. Limitations in the analysis of animal metaphor are unavoidable, but the study from language philosophy and cognitive perspectives still has its theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, on one hand, it elaborates why metaphor exists everywhere from philosophical and cognitive aspects; on the other hand, BT is evolved and the new theory EBT is put into the analysis of the Aves to make more people aware of the importance of human's cognitive process hidden behind the two inputs in BT. Practically, it improves the learner's understanding towards the animal metaphor.