Metaphor In Context-A Brief Introduction To Josef Stern's Metaphor View

The dissertation makes a preliminary study to the metaphor idea of Professor Josef Stern of Chicago University in America. Chapter I is a brief introduction to the frame of Stern's metaphor idea and then elaborates some main concepts. Chapter II concentrate on the constructing process of semantic theory of metaphor. And the writer evaluates the pragmatics theory of metaphor which Stern composes to Davidson in detail, and discusses the reason of trying to construct a kind of semantic theory of metaphor while let the metaphor under the background of pragmatics. Then, on the base of Kaplan's demonstratives and the model of Dthat-descriptives, this chapter explains the way by which Stern establishes his own Mthat-theory, and take the presupposition as an examples to illustrate the relationship between the semantics theory and the pragmatics theory of metaphor. Chapter III mainly show the return from semantics theory to the pragmatics theory, that is to say, the semantics theory confirms the central effect of context in a metaphor interpretation by its own way. And then it takes the dead metaphor and the different levels of semantics as example to illustrate Stern's some opinions on the relationships of metaphor and context, and intrinsically reveals how possible a semantic theory of metaphor is.