The Metaphorical System Of “Nature-Man-Text” In Chinese Poetics

Metaphor is a typical and pervasive language phenomenon in Chinese traditional literary theory and Chinese classical aesthetics, because ancient Chinese literary critics usually employ metaphorical expressions or terms such as “feng gu”, “yun wei”, “ge nian xia zhong”, “heng yun duan shan” to express their thoughts and evaluations about arts and aesthetics instead of pure abstract terminologies. Those metaphorical expressions or terms are defined as poetic metaphor.Since the 1970s, a new rush of metaphor study has emerged and widely spread among European and American scholars. During this process, metaphor study was firstly deepened to the cognitive level from language level. And cognitive metaphor theory has been developed into one of the basic claims of cognitive linguistics. According to the recent publications abroad, more and more scholars have paid attention to the study among “language”, “culture” and “cognition”. Under this background, the thesis aims at the metaphorical expressions in Chinese traditional literary theory and Chinese classical aesthetics, which are defined as poetic metaphor by the author in the thesis. Generally speaking, the thesis mainly analyzes the cognitive mechanism of Chinese poetic metaphor from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and explains the cause of Chinese poetic metaphor from the perspective of cultural linguistics. In addition, in order to explain the relationship among “language”, “culture” and “cognition”, the thesis also develops the principle of “reality-cognitionlanguage” into the “reality-culture-cognition-language” model, and applies the model to the explanation of Chinese poetic metaphor.Specifically, the thesis initially introduced the conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory from cognitive linguistics to analyze how the source domain of “nature” and “man” are related to literary criticism by means of mapping or conceptual blending. Then, the author of this thesis finds out that the relation among “nature”, “man” and “text” is a unique product of Chinese cognitive style rather than a relationship shared by all nations. Cultural cognition and cultural conceptualization theory all put emphasis on the role of culture in shaping people's cognition. The cognitive or thinking patterns of a cultural group are collectively called cognitive style. As we Chinese all know, the cognitive style of Chinese nation is greatly influenced by traditional Chinese culture, which develops Confucian culture and Taoist culture as its core parts. The shared principle of two cultures is the unity of nature and man, and traditional Chinese culture is a kind of farming culture which advocates humanity and shows respect to nature. And this kind of culture originated from ancestral framing practice. In Chinese traditional literary criticism, the way of criticizing literary works in terms of man and nature exhibits the influence of traditional Chinese culture on Chinese cognitive style. Thus the thesis concludes that Chinese poetic metaphor is the co-product of Chinese farming culture and cognition. Finally, as to the relationship among “reality”, “culture”, “cognition” and “language”, Chinese poetic metaphor, as an example, clarifies that the culture of a language group originates from their ancestral practice(the experiential basis of culture); human cognition owns a deep root in its culture(the cultural basis of cognition); and language expressions are directly influenced by the speakers' cognitive style(the cognitive basis of language).