Conceptual Metaphor And Discourse Coherence

Metaphor has traditionally been viewed as a rhetorical device and the study of metaphor is mainly limited to lexical, phrasal and syntactical level. With the publication of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphor We Live By in 1980, the study of metaphor is brought into a cognitive field. Lakoff and Johnson claim that the process of human thought is largely metaphorical, and metaphor plays an important role in conceptualizing human experience. With the development of conceptual metaphor study, some scholars, abroad and at home, have dealt with the textual role of metaphor. Although there are some studies explaining the coherence construction of discourse by theory of concept metaphor, it is not definite that the way of constructing coherences can explain all kinds of corpus. Currently, scholars still analyze themes of English majored students or professional texts of English in their studies mainly. Almost no one analyses the coherence of text written by middle school students using concept coherence as a study. In light of Lakoff's theory of conceptual metaphor, this thesis explores the mode of coherence constructed by conceptual metaphor by anglicizing 100 texts chosen from corpus of High school English composition. From the sample analysis, it has been found out that coherence in the English composition of high school students can be constructed by three forms: one conceptual metaphor, two conceptual metaphors and one preinstall, and a few conceptual metaphors. The systematicity of conceptual metaphor and overlapping entailments between different source domains can contribute to discourse coherence. When constructing the coherence of discourse with conceptual metaphors, the conceptual metaphors are not chosen randomly. We can analyze the coherence of this kind of compositions with analyzing the entailments of different concepts.