A Cognitive Study Of Mottoes Of Top U.S. Universities

Thousands of years ago, scholars began to study metaphor. They pay their attention to metaphor since Aristotle’s age. In the traditional theory, metaphor is regarded as an ornamental device which is usually associated with poetry or rhetoric.Traditional linguists also considered the metonymy as a rhetorical device which used to replace something else with which it is associated or to modify language. With the development of the times, linguistics was also made progress by linguists. Since1980 s,the conceptual metaphor theory and metonymy theory have been put forward in the masterpiece Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson, which marks that the metaphor and metonymy study have entered a new cognitive era. The studies show that metaphor and metonymy are the powerful tools of understanding and expressing abstract concepts; they not only belong to language but also belong to cognition. Metaphor and metonymy, based on the resemblance and relevance of conceptual structure are the projections from source domain target domain and the process of understanding and expressing another unfamiliar things.In recent years, theses and articles concerning the research on metaphor and metonymy emerge in an endless stream, covering many areas such as, philosophy,psychology,and sports etc. However, metaphor and metonymy study in regard to motto of universities are comparatively limited. On the one hand, people pay more attention to the education of university. On the other hand more and more people are eager to take part in international exchange programs to understand university culture of other countries. As the name card of the university, the university motto worth our research and exploration.This research is based on the mottoes of the U.S.universities, which are taken from the specialized magazine U.S. News.during the period of September 2015. It employs both introspective methodology and empirical methodology. This research attempts to explore the basic types and functions of metaphor and metonymy in the top 100 universities’ motto of U.S. On the one hand, this research attempts to explorethe regularity of metaphor in mottoes of top U.S. universities from the perspective of cognition, and the means of the realization of metaphor in mottoes of top U.S.universities. On the other hand, it intends to summarize the relationship between the culture and mottoes.Firstly, the results of the research show that metaphors of university motto are used more frequently than metonymies of university. Conceptual metaphor has been applied to the mottoes of the top 100 universities of U.S. in large quantities, covering all of orientational metaphor, ontological metaphor and structural metaphor.. In the corpus, there are seven kinds structural metaphor, namely, PLANT metaphor, WIND metaphor, BAND metaphor, LIGHT metaphor, POWER metaphor and DEBT metaphor. Ontological metaphor mainly focus on the container metaphor and personification. Personification metaphor is the most prevalent and widely used type of metaphor in mottoes of top U.S. Universities. As for the orientational metaphor,there are one major types: FRONT-BACK metaphor. There are only one kind of metonymy applies in the mottoes of U.S. University, namely Thing-and-Part ICM metonymy. The larger application of the language expressions of metaphors than metonymies leads us draw a conclusion when people conceptualize the world and the everyday life, the metaphor is more convenient than metonymy. Secondly, metaphors of the mottoes of the top 100 universities of U.S. also have the characteristic of universality systematicy and cultural Coherence. Thirdly, human beings’ experience about body and life is the fundamental source of expressions of metaphors and metonymies in the top 100 universities of American.Metonymy and metaphor play an important role in motto language. This paper provides a new perspective to study the mottoes. All in all, the findings in this study further testify the claim that human beings’ cognitive development is based on their bodily experiences and daily life. This tentative research enriches the studies of metaphors and metonymies in the field of cognitive linguistics to some extent, and provides hints to understand the culture of the motto. However,there are also limitations and implications. For example, the corpus size may be not large enough to make a perfect study of the conceptual metaphors and metonymy in the universitymotto field. And also, introspective methodology and empirical methodology are taken as the main method of analyzing the corpus. In the future studies of metaphor and metonymy, larger scaled corpus and more objective analyzing tools of metaphor study would be of more validity. Future studies should be more comprehensive to include the motto of Western University,or the contrast study between Chinese university motto and western university motto.