A Study Of Discourse Functions Of Conceptual Metaphor In English Proses

Since the1980s, the study of metaphor has transferred from the traditionalrhetoric area to the cognitive domain. As one of the important propositions incontemporary cognitive linguistics, lots of researches on metaphor are done at thelevel of words, phrases and sentences, however, a systematic study of metaphor in thecontext of discourse has not yet been shaped in its own right, especially using prosesas the corpus of the study has not been covered.This study seeks to find:(1) What are discourse functions of conceptualmetaphors in English proses?(2) How do conceptual metaphors contribute to thesefunctions in English proses? This thesis attempts to use proses as the corpus to make apreliminary exploration of the discourse functions of conceptual metaphor and theways of conceptual metaphor contributing to these functions from the point view offunctional linguistics and cognitive linguistics, as well as the interface betweenmetaphorical cognition and discourse analysis. Studying conceptual metaphor fromthe discourse level can reveal not only the discourse functions of conceptual metaphor,but also, to some extent, can further enrich the contents of discourse study and expandthe scope of the study of language reviews.The major findings of this thesis are as follows: Conceptual metaphor performsthe cohesive and coherent functions in English proses and it is one of the mostimportant means of constructing discourse cohesion and coherence. Cohesion formedby conceptual metaphor, on the one hand, derives from the interaction betweenvehicle and tenor. From the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory in cognitivelinguistics, conceptual metaphor forms cohesion through the mapping between twoconcepts. On the other hand, conceptual metaphor displays the discourse cohesion bythe cohesive devices at the surface level of English proses, which mainly includesrepetition, synonymy, collocation, hyponymy, reference and so on. Based on theselexical or syntactical relationships, these cohesive devices work across Tenor and/orVehicle forms which can develop into a variety of “metaphorical chains” in theprogression of the metaphorical discourse, which contributes to discourse cohesion. Inaddition, conceptual metaphor can also perform coherent function at the deep level ofEnglish proses as a result of metaphorical entailment. In details, for the English proses which involve only one conceptual metaphor, intra-metaphorical entailment plays amajor role in constructing discourse coherence, while for those English proses whichcontain two or more conceptual metaphors, conceptual metaphors achieve discoursecoherence by the way of inter-metaphorical entailment, hierarchical entailment,subcategorization entailment and parallel entailment.