A Study Of Emotion Metaphors In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Image Schema

Metaphor study can be traced back to ancient Greek over two thousand years ago when it was merely confined to the field of traditional rhetoric.The rhetoricians hold that metaphor is only a figure of speech,a phenomenon at the linguistic level.With the development of cognitive linguistics,the notion of conceptual metaphor was proposed by cognitive linguists.They point out that metaphor is not only a linguistic device,but also a mode of thinking.The nature of metaphor is to structure and explain one experience in terms of another.The metaphorical expressions at the linguistic level are nothing but external manifestations of the metaphorical thoughts.Emotion is one of the most pervasive and significant experiences of human beings.As abstract concepts,emotions are often described in terms of metaphorical linguistic expressions to reflect the inner world of human beings.Thus,the study of emotion metaphors has become one of the tasks for cognitive linguistics to explore human cognition.Fortress Besieged is a milestone work in the history of Chinese literature.The employment of numerous metaphors has greatly contributed to the linguistic feature of this novel which is popular for its fine sense of humor,and the emotion metaphors employed are very conspicuous and pervasive,which are of significant value in analyzing the emotional world of the characters in the novel.Image schema,one of the important methods by which human beings come to know the world,plays a crucial role in the generation and interpretation of conceptual meaning.With the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Image Schema Theory as theoretical foundations,this thesis is to conduct a tentative cognitive analysis on the emotion metaphors in Fortress Besieged from the perspective of image schema.By reference to the research about basic emotions made by K?vecses,emotions in Fortress Besieged are first classified into five categories,namely,happiness,anger,sadness,fear and love.Then a qualitative analysis is conducted to explain how the metaphorical expressions of the five basic emotions in Fortress Besieged are constructed by means of image schemas.In addition,the thesis also makes an exploration of the pragmatic effects conveyed by the image schema-based emotion metaphors in Fortress Besieged.Through the study of emotion metaphors in Fortress Besieged from the perspective of image schema,the thesis finds out that in the construction of emotion metaphors,image schemas,serving as the source domain,are mapped onto the target domain of emotions.As a result,the emotions are endowed with the knowledge structures of image schemas.That is,the abstract emotions are able to be described and understood in terms of the characteristics and properties of image schemas.Besides,the thesis also finds out that the image schema-based emotion metaphors in Fortress Besieged can not only make the emotions more universally understood,but also make salient primary emotional implications and highlight the theme to some degree.The thesis broadens the scope of the research on emotion metaphors in literary works,and gives a more powerful explanation of emotions in Fortress Besieged on the basis of image schemas.Meanwhile,the thesis is also of referential value for the future related studies.