A PMB Approach To Metaphors In The Bible

As one of the classics in the history of western civilization, The Bible is not only a Christian scripture, but also the important source of western culture. There are a large amount of metaphorical expressions in The Bible, these metaphors have attracted the attention of many scholars at home and abroad. But most of them study biblical metaphors from the angle of theology, literature or culture, and their studies are often confined to the rhetorical aspect. There are few studies of biblical metaphors from the perspective of cognitive linguistics at home and abroad. Therefore, it is of certain academic significance and application value to create a interpretation framework for biblical metaphors on the strength of cognitive linguistics. As important theories of cognitive linguistics, The Prototype Theory, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory have their own features in terms of language research and analysis, so the integration of these three theories can better interpret the metaphors in The Bible. In view of this, the author attempts to integrate these three cognitive theories to create a PMB framework as the interpretation framework of biblical metaphors in order to further test the operability of this framework in practice.The creation of this framework mainly based on the following assumptions: there are a lot of metaphors in The Bible, these metaphors are not only the perfection of language use, but also the real embodiment of people’s metaphorical thinking. Biblical metaphors can be regarded as the revelation of spiritual truth of God. Therefore, these metaphors completely accord with the cognitive model of human beings. This hypothesis makes it possible to study biblical metaphors from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Through the analysis of the study, the author finds that: first of all, studying the metaphors in The Bible from the perspective of cognitive linguistics can enrich the biblical metaphor study and help people get a more comprehensive understanding of The Bible. Secondly, by integrating related theories of cognitive linguistic theories and taking some samples from The Bible as the research object, this framework confirms that people can use some familiar things in everyday life to understand those obscure, abstract concepts. Thirdly, this thesis argues that the biblical metaphor interpretation is based on the collaboration of prototypical meaning, structural mapping and conceptual integration. This view will provide reference for the future study of other language phenomenon.