A Study On The Mechanism Of Analogical Metaphors

British rhetorician I.A.Richards once said,"A metaphor may appear in almost every three sentences in our daily conversation." With the development of cognitive linguistics,metaphor research has made great progress.Domestic linguists have systematically reviewed metaphors as the core.In 1980,Lakoff & Johnson coauthored the masterpiece Metaphors We Live By which turned the direction from metaphor research into cognition,which broke the concept of traditional metaphors,proposed conceptual metaphor theory,and also provided new perspectives and directions for metaphor research.Many Chinese scholars have found contradictions in the study of conceptual metaphors.That is,the application of conceptual metaphors involves a certain form of logical thinking.It does not reflect the metaphor that need to compare two propositions during the development in traditional Chinese analogical thinking.It is called analogical metaphors.There are more researches on conceptual metaphor at home and abroad,but few on analogical thinking,analogical reasoning and analogical metaphors.This article conducts in-depth research on the basis of the original conceptual metaphors,studies a new metaphor——analogical metaphor,clarifies that it is the typical metaphorical logical thinking and metaphorical reasoning modes of Chinese language,and establishes analogical reasoning paradigms for intuitive thinking.It also lays the foundation for the study of Western languages using analogical metaphors.It is speculated that there is a corresponding side of affairs behind the two parties.The value of studying analogical metaphors is not only that they have Chinese characteristics and particularities.But the nature of analogical metaphors reflects the universality of metaphors.When conducting social science research in China,including language research,Chinese and Western cultures are not binary oppositions.In the social context of the new era,they are all resources used by me.“The dreams of red mansion” is one of the four great classical novels of China,which is also a masterpiece with great influence on the world.The author Cao Xueqin used a lot of metaphors to depict the characters,express the language and reveal the theme.The use of metaphor in novels contributes to its high literary status and provides a corpus basis for the study of metaphor in cognitive linguistics.In recent years,the studies of “The dreams of red mansion” are more and more,which are mainly from the perspective of rhetorical metaphor and conceptual metaphor.However,traditional metaphors and conceptual metaphors study Chinese corpus has its limitations.Foreign scholars know little about Chinese cultural tradition,historical background,national characteristics and traditional way of thinking.So their researches inevitably deviate from Chinese social background and reality.It is an innovative direction to study poetry from the perspective of analogical metaphor.This paper intends to determine the consensus feature of conceptual metaphors,namely similarity,from the combing of metaphorical literature history.Based on this,we confirm the metaphor's linguistic expression,that is,analogy.Foreign philosophical researches focus on the essence of an entity's "what is".Chinese philosophy pays more attention to how to use progressive relations to take examples as evidence to clarify the connotation research of such entities.Therefore,many analogies in Chinese aim at clearing the frame of an entity or something.The key to the interpretation of analogical metaphors lies in the extraction of attributes of a certain thing or phenomenon.Therefore,based on the fruitful results of the study of conceptual metaphors in China and the West,from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics,on the basis of Gestalt theory,the analysis method of "category-genus" connection is used to clarify the universality and regularity of attribute operations in analogical metaphors,using The Dreams of Red Mansion's poems as corpus,to explore the mechanism of analogical metaphors.