A Study Of Cognitive Metaphorical Meanings Of "Mouth"

Metaphor is an important cognitive model and it is also an important means to produce new meanings of words. Metaphor, by which people live, is pervasive in the world. Cognitive metaphor is not only a language form but also a cognitive means of the people. It is a conceptual process that human uses one familiar thing to recognize, understand and express another unfamiliar or abstract thing. Cognitive metaphor theory has been utilized in many aspects of studies, such as in semantics, pragmatics and text analysis. The achievements of study in semantics are especially prominent. These researches have revealed the function of cognitive metaphorical thinking model to the word meaning in the varying degrees and the different angles. However, at present, a systematical research of cognitive semantics on"mouth"is less touched. This paper analyzes the cognitive metaphorical meanings of"mouth"by applying the prototype theory, image schema theory and cognitive metaphor theory so as to further explain the function of the cognitive metaphorical thinking model in the metaphorical meaning extensions of"mouth". The cognitive metaphorical meanings of"mouth"have been analyzed based on the corpora taken from The Dictionary of Xinhua and The Dictionary of Chinese Idioms in Chinese Dictionary (electronic version 4.00) and Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU Corpus (CCL) and The British National Corpus (BNC), including 8788 items on"mouth". The study proves that metaphor is pervasive and systematic once again. Human metaphorical thought has similarity in some aspects. Metaphorical meanings constructed by"mouth"mostly derive from the motivation of entity and space in the world. Meanwhile, the results of this study enrich the study of conceptual metaphor.