A Cognitive Approach To Metaphors In Emily Bronte’s Poems

Metaphor is omnipresent in language. The language of poetry is regarded as highly metaphorical. Metaphor is an essential component of poetry and it helps poets create new thoughts which revitalize language. Thus, interpreting metaphors constitutes the key point in the comprehension of poems. Metaphor is traditionally defined as a literary or rhetorical device in which a word or phrase is used to describe something it does not literally denote. From traditional views, the understanding of a metaphor is realized through the comparison of the similarities, which ignores the cognitive process of the comprehension of a metaphor. However, with the publication of the ground-breaking masterpiece Metaphors We Live By in 1980 written by Lakoff and Johnson, the research of metaphor has entered into a cognitive era. Cognitive linguistics claims that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life and our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.Recently, with the rapid development of cognitive science, some scholars have been working from cognitive linguistic perspective to interpret literary works in the attempt to pave a new way for literary analysis. Based on the cognitive theories, this thesis, instead of being a traditional literary analysis, will take some of the insights from cognitive linguistics to interpret Emily Bronte’s poems. Emily Bronte is one of the most influential and enigmatic poets as well as novelists in the history of British literature. The poems of Emily Bronte are passionate and powerful works that convey vitality of the human spirit and of the natural world. Two frontier theories will be used, namely, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Integration Theory.By analyzing metaphors in the selected poems, the author attempts to (a) explore conceptual metaphors in Emily Bronte’s poems in the framework of Conceptual Metaphor theory; (b) explain how metaphors in Emily’s poems are generated and understood by adopting Conceptual Integration Theory; (c) demonstrate how conceptual metaphor and conceptual integration of her text world illustrate her worldview and life philosophy. Through a careful study of several of Emily Bronte’s representative poems from a cognitive linguistic perspective, the author comes to the following conclusions. Firstly, the metaphors in the selected poems provide the necessary knowledge to understand the very poems. Some metaphors are based PATH schema and CONTAINMENT schema. Poetic language, like ordinary language, is also a cognitive process which mediates our experience of reality. Secondly, the analyses reveal the mechanism of how the meaning of metaphorical expressions are understood, which will enrich the understanding of Emily’s poems. Thirdly, we explore how Emily’s poetic world illustrates her worldview and life philosophy. Bronte believes in the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. She viewed life as a journey which has a beginning and a destination. It is her view that the goal of our lives is to seek the sublimation of spirit, which needs to be attained through death.Aiming at broadening the horizons to poetry analysis and offering an approach to exploring Emily’s inner world, this research will let people reconsider and reevaluate the value of Emily’s poetry and offer readers a more thorough comprehension of her poetry by exploring Emily’s poems from a cognitive angle. In addition, this interdisciplinary research which combines theories of cognitive linguistics with literary texts will promote the interactive development between the two disciplines.