An Interpretation Of Poetic Metaphors From The Perspective Of Cognitive Poetics

The combination of cognitive linguistics and literature criticism has produced anew and forceful tool for literature interpretation—cognitive poetics, which is a newsubject based on cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. Metaphor, as the coreelement of cognitive linguistics, remains a core status in the field of cognitive poetics.Metaphor study in cognitive poetics has introduced the conceptual metaphor theoryand blending theory form cognitive linguistics; at the same time, it formulates its owncharacteristics during the interpretation of literature texts. This thesis, suggests thatconceptual metaphor theory (CMT) can make an easy and convenient explanationtowards conventional metaphor interpretation, while blending theory (BT) can give abetter interpretation in terms of complicated metaphors. Thus, a new model based onCMT and BT, conceptual blending metaphor (CBM) model is proposed. This newCBM model, combining the advantages of the two theories, can provide a systematicand comprehensive interpretation towards poetic metaphors, including their surfacemanifestatioin and underlied meaning. This new attempt to combine the two theoriestogether leads poetic metaphor interpretation to the cognitive level from the traditionalpoetics, which enriches the study of cognitive poetics and complies with the trend ofintegration of linguistics and literary.In order to make the study more scientific and reasonable, this thesis restricts thescope of research to Tang Poetry. With The300Tang poems edited by Heng Tangtuishiin Qing Dynasty as corpora, it makes a comprehensive recognization, classificationand interpretation towards poetic metaphors and suggests that cognitive poetics canserve as a more powerful interpretation mechanism and give a sufficient interpretationtowards poetic metaphors in poetry. Through the analysis of the deep cognitivemechanism, it verifies that literature thought, as a part of human experience, derivesfrom everyday thought, which manifests the nature of metaphor and brings metaphorstudy in a new field, thus pushes forward the research of cognitive metaphor.This thesis, employing the latest achievements of cognitive science and cignitivelinguistics to interpret poetic metaphor—a microphenomenon in literature, belongs to the narrow field of cognitve poetics. It proves to be a new attempt and provides a newapproach towards the research and understanding of classical literatures. The analysisof metaphor manifestation at different levels enriches the study of cognitive metaphorand broadens its research field; at the same time, it provides abundent languagematerials for the localization of cognitive poetics theory.