Influence Of Conceptual Metaphor On English Argumentative Writing

Metaphor is traditionally regarded as a kind of figure of speech by linguistics.In the 1980s,Lakoff and Johnson advanced Conceptual Metaphor Theory which completes"cognitive turn" of metaphor study.The theory asserts that metaphor should be recognized as an indispensable cognitive instrument and the way of life we can’t live without.This thesis attempts to bridge the gap between the theoretical study of conceptual metaphor and the practical applications of the theories in English argumentative writing.For Chinese EFL learners,many factors negatively affect their writing performance,such as the limited vocabulary,grammar mistakes,"Chinglish" way of thinking,bald statement of attitude,unpolished literary expressions,etc.Being the indispensable tool in human conceptualization,conceptual metaphor surely reveals the linguistic functions of cognitive metaphor on many aspects of English argumentative writing,such as vocabulary acquisition,rhetoric expressing,ideological construction and conceptual fluency attaining.Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this study explores the existing differences on employment of a kind of typical metaphorical instantiations--denominal verbs between Chinese EFL learners of different proficiencies and native English speakers.The author adopts the argumentative compositions produced by English majors in Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners established by Professor Wen Qiufang as the Chinese EFL learners corpus.In accordance with the writing style of the learner corpus,the Native Speaker Corpus is composed of editorials and comments which are randomly chosen from six quality American and British broadsheets.Research Procedures mainly include three steps:First,POS-tag all the corpora mentioned above.Then use the corpus search tool AntConc to find the frequency of the 1275 denominal verbs on the list provided by Clark&Clark(1979)one by one with the search pattern one denominal verb*_V*in all the corpora.Lastly,use the Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator to test the significance of the difference.The data shows that there are great differences in frequency in the use of denominal verbs between native speakers of English and Chinese EFL learners.Firstly,compared with native English speakers,Chinese EFL learners of different proficiencies all significantly underuse metaphorical expressions in the aspects of tokens and types.In addition,there also exist great significant differences between Chinese EFL learners of different proficiencies:advanced learners perform better in the employment of metaphorical expressions.However,compared with intermediate learners,advanced learners merely make progress on the frequency of employment of denominal verbs,rather than equipping themselves a better mastery of various and flexible vocabulary of metaphorical expressions.The underlying reasons are also explored in this thesis.The study issues two distinctive initiatives.One is making use of the corpus-based method to do this research.The reliable data from authentic language materials render the analysis objective and convincing.The other is integrating cognitive theory with pragmatic characteristics of metaphor to explore the possible roles that metaphor might play on English argumentative writing.Chinese EFL learners are expected to benefit from the findings of the present study and to produce native-like English through improving metaphorical ability.