A Study Of The Role Of Conceptual Metaphors In Establishing Coherence In Fortress Besieged

Metaphor has traditionally been treated as a figure of speech which is studied only at lexical and syntactical levels. With the development of natural and social science, metaphor researchers have borrowed researching methods from other academic fields such as anthropology, psychology, philosophy, education and science and begun to study metaphor in a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary way. The landmark publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By signifies the cognitive turn in metaphor study. They put forward the conceptual metaphor theory and claim that metaphor is a way of cognition and thinking in which people conceptualize their experience and the external world. The cross-domain mapping in conceptual metaphors can be realized by the surface metaphorical expressions. Thus it is reasonable to infer that conceptual metaphors can help to organize a discourse and contribute to discourse coherence. Scholars such as Goatly (1997,2000), Liao Meizhen (1992) and Feng Xiaohu (2004) have realized the textual function of conceptual metaphors and paid special attention to the role of conceptual metaphors in establishing cohesion and coherence. However, it seems that there are few systematic studies that analyze the textual function of conceptual metaphors with the conceptual metaphor theory in a specific discourse, especially in a literary one. Therefore, the author attempts to explore how conceptual metaphors contribute to coherence in a Chinese narrative novel Fortress Besieged (Ch’ien,2012), which has a high metaphor density.The present study integrates conceptual metaphor theory with the cognitive approach to coherence. Based on a detailed description of experiential basis, working mechanism, systcmaticity and coherence of conceptual metaphors, the author seeks to find in what ways metaphor helps to construct local coherence and global coherence in Fortress Besieged. Meanwhile, the analysis is made both within one single metaphor and among different metaphors. It has been found that on one hand. conceptual metaphors in Fortress Besieged can build local coherence through the systematic mapping from source domain to target domain, the overlapping entailments between source domain and target domain or among various source domains as well as close relationships between source domains at the conceptual level. Also, different source domains highlighting various aspects of one concept can create coherence. On the other hand, different conceptual metaphors work together to support the motif by revolving around it, which contributes more to the global coherence. All these findings show that conceptual metaphors do play an essential role in creating discourse coherence, which provides considerable insights into the conceptual metaphor theory and meanwhile enriches discourse analysis theories.