| Nutshell is published in 2016.It is the 17th novel of Ian McEwan.In Nutshell,there are four main characters:Trudy,Claude,John and“I”.The main character“I”,a fetus,unfolds the whole story by describing gradually the details how his mother Trudy and his uncle Claude plan to murder his father John.Apart from captivating expressions and elegiac theme,McEwan gives the fetus an omniscient perspective to uncover the whole process of the murder.Nutshell depicts various social problems by means of abundant and new conceptual metaphors.There are four main perspectives to study McEwan's novel at home and abroad:they are respectively from ethics,feminism,psychology and narratology.Due to the short publication time,studies on Nutshell are very limited.Research abroad is mainly in the form of review.In China,only two scholars have studied it.Chen Dawei?2016?studies Nutshell by comparing it with Hamlet and Shang Biwu?2017?studies the unnatural narrative in Nutshell from the perspective of ethics.The conceptual metaphors in Nutshell have not been studied so far.Based on conceptual metaphor theory,which studies language phenomena from the perspective of cognition,this thesis is intended to systematically study McEwan's novel Nutshell from the perspective of conceptual metaphors and aims at answer the following questions:?1?What major conceptual metaphors are there in Nutshell??2?What are the functions of the conceptual metaphors in Nutshell??3?What are the typical features of the conceptual metaphors in Nutshell?In the work Metaphors We Live By,Johnson and Lakoff?1980?mention that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life,not just in language but in thought and action.Our ordinary conceptual system,in terms of which we both think and act,is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.Metaphor can be regarded as a way of thinking and a cognitive means.It is a systematic mapping from a concrete conceptual domain to an abstract conceptual domain.They believe that there is a systematic connection between metaphorical expression and metaphorical concept in language.With this connection,metaphorical language expression can be effectively used to reflect the nature of metaphorical concept and thus help human understand the metaphorical nature of various activities.Lakoff defines metaphor as“understanding one thing in terms of another”and calls the familiar things“source domain”,and the things understood by“source domain”“target domain”.At the same time,Lakoff also proposes the“Invariance Principle”.That is,in a metaphor,the source domain and the target domain interact by means of mapping,which is one-way interaction and can only be projected from the“source domain”to the“target domain”.In addition,Johnson and Lakoff divide metaphors into structural metaphors,orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors.Structural metaphors map the source concept to the target concept by the way of“structural mapping”,and are words with multi-purpose phenomenon after the superposition of two categories of concepts.For instance,in the metaphor TIME IS MONEY,time and money belong to different conceptual systems.Through structural mapping,people can see their similarity.Therefore,abstract notions are visualized through metaphors.Orientation metaphors are a set of conceptual systems formed by spatial concepts such as up and down,inside and outside,front and back,center,etc.,such as HAPPY IS UP and SAD IS DOWN.These orientations are the embodiment of direct human experience.They are established with the body as the reference point and are the metaphorical results of the common human body experience.Ontological metaphors,including entity,substance metaphor,container metaphor and personification,express the abstract experience through human perception of the objective material world and basic experience,such as thoughts,ideas,behavior.For instance,in the metaphor MIND IS A MACHINE,it is more vivid and easier for readers to understand the abstract experience“mind in the brain”by mapping it to a machine.Therefore,more expressions related to brain and machine can be learned.Based on the advantages of conceptual metaphor in textual research,this thesis combines the classification of metaphors by Johnson and Lakoff with the writing skills and background information of McEwan to subdivide the metaphors in Nutshell.Then,the background information of McEwan's writing style and the introductions of the theme are sorted out for readers to better understand the metaphors.The third step is to select all relevant expressions of the metaphors and the complete sentences.Finally,this thesis systematically analyzes the functions of these specific metaphorical forms.Through a detailed text analysis towards all the metaphors in Nutshell,it has arrived at three findings:First,based on the collected data,it is found that there are mainly 7 conceptual metaphors and 27 sub-conceptual metaphors in Nutshell:3 sub-wall metaphors,5 sub-color metaphors,6 sub-body metaphors,3 sub-animal metaphors,5 sub-up and down metaphors,3sub-container metaphors and 2 sub-personification metaphors.Among them,body metaphors account for the first place.Meanwhile,body metaphors in Nutshell comprise the most various contents,including 6 sub-metaphors.Second,these conceptual metaphors perform three functions:cognitive function,highlighting function and economic function.Conceptual metaphors in Nutshell enable abstract concepts to be visible and audible by readers through cognitive functions.For example,the wall in structural metaphors,which is a visible and sensible object,helps readers experience the predicaments of the fetus both physically and psychologically.The second function of conceptual metaphors in Nutshell is to highlight the meaning of its target domain.By means of target domains like death,dilemma,fear,danger,control,revenge etc.,McEwan tells a story of family murder,highlighting the contradictory relations in modern society.The economic function of the conceptual metaphors in Nutshell is that these metaphors make language more concise.They work as tools to help readers understand the plots more effectively by conveying a series of images with concise phrases or even just a single word.Those conceptual metaphors with economic functions are powerful tools for shaping characters,helping to convey a specific theme,atmosphere and world view,or creating ubiquitous metaphorical patterns,contributing to the overall meaning of the novel,especially the shaping of the internal image of the novel.Third,the conceptual metaphors in Nutshell contain three typical features:firstly,the conceptual metaphors in Nutshell prove conceptual metaphor theory that metaphor is a way of thinking and cognitive means rather than just a kind of language.Besides,conceptual metaphors,especially novel metaphors,are highly contextual and culturally specific.Some new conceptual metaphors only exist in Nutshell,but not in daily life or all cultures.Lastly,the conceptual metaphors in Nutshell overlap with each other:?1?the same source domain may project more than two target domains,and sometimes the two target domains have the opposite affective meanings;?2?a target domain can be mapped by various source domains.This overlap appears frequently in the conceptual metaphors of container and body in Nutshell.This thesis is the first one to study Nutshell from the perspective of the conceptual metaphor theory,and it is an exploration and supplement to researches on Ian McEwan.In addition,new and unique conceptual metaphors in the novel enrich the types of conceptual metaphors,and provide new research directions and references for further studies.Finally,this research can provide an effective channel for readers to understand and appreciate the novel Nutshell. |
PDF Full Text Request