| Cognitive linguists put forward that the development and changes of lexical meanings intrinsically originate from the cognitive thinking of language users, whose studies indicate that polysemy is that a word’s central meaning or basic meaning extends to other meanings through metaphor and it is the result of human cognitive conceptualization. Therefore, the basis of metaphor is “cognitive conceptualization”. In 2003, The Extent of the Literal: Metaphor,Polysemy and Theories of Concepts, written by Marina Rakova, was published to open a new chapter of metaphor studies. She agrees with the cognitive nature of metaphor,and explores what is metaphoric meaning or what is literal meaning from the aspects of polysemy and conceptual structure, which provides many inspirations to linguistic research and lexical semantics in the scope of world. In the Chinese learning and research, combined with this theory we will explore its reference value of Chinese research.This paper adopts the method of theory and practice, and focuses on objective introduction and deep analysis, trying to compare micro point of theory with the connotation of terms and first study this important book to explain its inspiration to Chinese semantics, lexicology and related application studies. The main structure introduces related studies about The Extent of the Literal and metaphor, and summarizes and explains its main content, presenting Rakova’s innovative development of metaphor. Then the third chapter and the forth chapter discuss translation and interpretation of important terms and classify metaphor to show the connotation of metaphor in details and explain its relevance, enlightenment and practical signification to Chinese lexicology. Finally, the last chapter shows clearly the innovation and development of metaphor theory in The Extent of the Literal and compares Lakoff’s metaphor theories with Rakova’s theories, using some Chinese examples to explore innovative development of metaphor theory. |
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