A Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In The Story Of The Stone's Poetry From Hawkes' Version

As a common language phenomenon which widely exists in human language,metaphor has already been studied by many linguists at home and abroad.With the development of cognitive linguistics,the study on metaphor has developed rapidly in the past few decades.Traditional scholars regard metaphor as a rhetorical device,and just conduct researches on rhetoric.In 1980,Lakoff and Jonson created the book titled Metaphors We Live By symbolizing the transfer from traditional metaphor theories to cognitive studies,and also proposed the theory of Conceptual Metaphor.From the perspective of cognitive linguists,conceptual metaphor is actually a way of action and thinking,even permeating in our daily life.Metaphor is not only a matter of human's life,but also reflects the specialty of culture.Culture,as a multi-dimentional abstract concept,cannot be described by simple words and needs to be constructed and analyzed by metaphor.Thus,metaphor conceptualized the cultural patterns of particular group.The Story of the Stone plays an important role in Chinese literature,and plenty of scholars have made studies on it.The writer Cao Xueqin used various metaphors to depict the characters and reveal the theme.To some extent,the use of metaphor makes great contribution to its high value of literature.Contend on a tragic love story about Jia Baoyu,Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai,the novel exposes the social phenomenon of Qing dynasty,which is regarded as the encyclopaedia of feudal society.Regarding this masterpiece The Story of the Stone,there are many scholars making different analysis,but most of researching focus on the Chinese version,leaving a few studies on Hawke's version.The author aims to answer the following questions in this thesis:(1)How are these poetry distributed among the three types of conceptual metaphor?(2)How are these poetry manifested in the three types of conceptual metaphor? The research shows that 23 sentences in JinLing prophecies can be grouped into conceptual metaphor;10 sentences are ontological metaphor;9 are structural metaphor,and 4 are orientational metaphor.In the ontological metaphor,the metaphorical sentences are reflected by entity and substance metaphors,personification and container metaphors.In structural metaphor,they are reflected by the categories of concept.And the mapping between target domain and source domain is created by familiar concept.In the orientational metaphor,they are presented through Down and In.Due to the cultural and linguistic differences between Chinese and English,Hawkes translated Jin Ling prophecies in a limited way.This thesis aims to study the conceptual metaphor in The Story of the Stone's Jin Ling prophecies and reflects the importance of metaphor in human's thought and action.Based on the analysis of structural metaphors,orientational metaphor and ontological metaphors,this study attempts to explore the poetry metaphor in Hawkes' version in order to verify the practicability of metaphor theories.