A Corpus-based Study Of Metaphor Use In College English Writing

The research of metaphor is always one of the hottest topics in Cognitive Linguistics. In recent years, a large number of books and theses concerning metaphor theories and metaphoric competence theories applied to English language teaching and learning have been released and published, among which the research on applying metaphor to college English writing is just one such kind. All these studies and findings facilitate college English writing teaching, and also leave room and give reflections for the development of college English teaching and learning.This thesis aims to study the use of metaphor in English writing, as well as the relationship between the use of metaphor in each composition and the score for each composition. The research is theoretically based on Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory. For this research, a new corpus is established, in which80pieces of writings (15488words in all) are randomly selected from the Chinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC) established by Professor Gui Shichun and Yang Huizhong as the data. A corpus-based approach is adopted for the analysis. These80compositions are to be investigated one by one to detect the most frequent used metaphors in the corpus, and find out whether there exists connection between the use of metaphor in a composition and the score of that composition.After the investigation, it is found that conceptual metaphors can be detected in almost every piece of writing. According to the Conceptual Mapping Theory by Lakoff, all metaphors appeared in the corpus can be identified according to seven different source domains, namely,"CONTAINER","MONEY","UNKNOWN OBJECT","MOVING OBJECT","FORCES","POWER" and "JOURNEY", among which the orientational metaphors "MORE IS UP","LESS IS DOWN" are the most frequent used; the structural metaphors and ontological metaphors like "TIME IS MONEY","SOCIETY IS AN UNKNOWN OBJECT", etc. are used relatively less. Through the comparative study of high-score compositions and lowered ones in the corpus, it is found that, compared with those compositions that are lack of kinds and number of metaphors, writings that are rich in both kinds and number of metaphors are more likely to be favored by the teacher and are always scored higher. The findings tell us the importance of metaphoric thinking and metaphoric competence in English writing. In future college English writing teaching, teachers should not only teach students essential writing skills, but also help students raise the awareness of the use of metaphors. In the teaching process, teachers should pay special attention to cultivate students’metaphoric competence to facilitate their ability of writing fundamentally.