| Metaphor has become an indispensable part in people's cognitive mechanism since Lakoff and Johnson's publication of the masterpiece Metaphors We Live by. They underlined that conceptual metaphor can be taken as a powerful cognitive tool for human conceptualization of abstract categories. Conceptual metaphor not only determines the way people conceptualize the whole world but also exerts great impacts on human conceptualization. And this is exactly the same as conceptual metaphors in the Bible.The recent three decades have brought a lot of publications dealing with metaphor in biblical literature. However, there are few studies approaching biblical texts systematically from conceptual metaphor and most of those studies are developed from the religious perspective. In addition, the impacts of these metaphors on human culture and thinking are of great research significance. Against this background, systematic studies have been developed to study conceptual metaphors in the Psalter from the cognitive perspective, one book of the Bible. Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory provides a theoretical foundation for the whole thesis. In order to offset deficiencies of conceptual metaphor in the study of biblical texts, quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in this study. Quantitative method is mainly used to collect data of metaphors'occurrence from 150 psalms. From the Psalter, 17 groups of main metaphors are sorted out from 507 metaphorical expressions. This study just selects five of them as metaphorical representatives, namely conceptual metaphor GOD IS KING (conceptual metaphors are conventionally written with capital letters); THE LORD IS THE SHEPHERD; THE LORD IS LIGHT; YAHWEH IS MY REFUGE; THE BELIEVERS ARE TREES. On the other hand, qualitative method is employed for a deeper analysis of the data and also for a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of how Psalmists convey their thoughts by means of familiar categories. With the help of comparative strategy, it is easy for us to find out similarities between the source domain and target domain of metaphors, the key part of metaphorical formations. Meanwhile, this analysis sheds light on the constructive and aesthetic functions of these conceptual metaphors.All the data indicates that psalmists have made full use of a limited set of metaphors that they could easily draw in their daily life to communicate certain attributes of God because most metaphors are employed to praise God's attribute and amazing deeds. Besides, the statistical evaluation of the survey demonstrates that metaphors are predominantly interactive with each other. These five root metaphors are actually related with each other and 65% of them are used to depict God anthropomorphically. Attention paid to the metaphors of king and shepherd, we can clearly see that both metaphors range relatively high in the frequency of occurrence. These two metaphors are sometimes used together to portray Hisl God's kingship and human love-caring.From the cognitive perspective, the present research demonstrates that people understand the abstract and obscure categories in terms of the concrete and familiar concepts in their daily life and the conceptual metaphor can be applied to the religious language --- Biblical language. It is true that conceptual metaphor is powerful cognitive tools for people to talk about or conceptualize the abstract categories. It is the abundant use of metaphors that make Psalter's language succinct with rich connotations and convincing power. Therefore, the Psalter scriptures are widely cited in people's daily language and literary works. In addition, those metaphorical expressions have exerted great impacts on human culture and thinking. Many phrases and allusions in English are deeply rooted in these metaphors and even some of them have become a part of our daily speech. The influence of these metaphors has permeated almost every aspect of life in the society, such as laws, art, literature, architecture, music, morals and religions. |
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