| The history of metaphor research is more than two thousand years, which can be traced back to the time of Aristotle. It can be divided into three periods: the rhetorical period, the semantic period and the multi-disciplinary period, based on the research contents and research methods(Shu, 2002). In 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson put forward the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, turning the metaphor research into cognitive research field. At the same time, great empirical evidences were provided for metaphor research by the thriving of Corpus Linguistics. Corpus tools are of great use in metaphor research, such as Wmatrix, a web-based corpus tool developed by Paul Rayson et al. in 2003, which makes the identification of metaphors from tremendous natural language use become possible. In the meanwhile, Gerard J. Steen(1990) presented Five Steps, an empirical method for metaphor identification and analysis in literary works. Till now, either Wmatrix or Steen's Five Steps has been applied in metaphor research of news or literary works.The Importance of Living(1937) is one of Lin Yutang's famous works. The book spreads the Chinese leisure life western readers successfully, gaining a great popularity in America. Lin's skillful descriptions of Chinese leisure life in the book greatly arouse the readers' sympathetic feelings. The narrative of the book quite suits the westerners' way of thinking and cognition. The success of The Importance of Living changes the viewpoints of Americans toward China and its people. The book is of great significance in spreading Chinese culture to the world.However, previous studies of the book are mainly book reviews with affirmative comments on its introducing Chinese culture to the western world or on its influence of being a bestseller in America. Now more research on this book made in China focuses on its literariness and cultural communication, but there are relatively less research made from the linguistic dimension, especially from the conceptual metaphor perspective.Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to explore the conceptual metaphors about life in the book. The thesis mainly includes the identification of the conceptual metaphors about life, the categories and the functions of these conceptual metaphors.The research questions are:Firstly, what is the distribution of the metaphors about life in The Importance of Living? Secondly, what are the categories of those metaphors? Thirdly, what are the functions of those metaphors?In order to find the relevant concordances, the author uploaded the text of The Importance of Living onto the Wmatrix to finish the semantic tagging. Based on the broad meaning of life that a person experiences from the birth to death and its narrow meaning: the ability to breathe, grow, reproduce, etc. which people, animals and plants have before they die, semantic targets related to life are searched from the five following ones: L1(Life and living things), L1+(Alive), L1-(Dead), L2(Living creatures: animals, birds, etc.) and L3(Plants). Conceptual metaphors are identified from the concordances in those five semantic targets, and classifications as well as analysis are made on the basis of Steen's Five Steps and the conceptual metaphor theory.Three major findings are discovered in the thesis. Firstly, conceptual metaphors are identified in every semantic target, based on Steen's Five Steps. Distinct keywords are in different semantic targets, such as culture in semantic target L1, life in L1+ and death in L1-. Secondly, all conceptual metaphors are classified into two categories, namely structural metaphors and ontological metaphors. Under each category, various subcategories are grouped. Thirdly, there are four major functions of these metaphors: the rhetorical, linguistic, poetic and cognitive functions. Relation can be implied between the employment of metaphors and the success of the book. |
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