A Study Of Metaphoric Gestures And Words In English Public Speaking Contest

Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson,this thesis attempts to investigate gestural and verbal metaphors in English public speaking contest.Conceptual Metaphor Theory holds that metaphor,instead of being a merely rhetoric,structures how we think and act.Since the end of the 20th century,represented by the forerunner Forceville,linguists put forward that language is only one of the various forms of metaphor.Metaphor can also be constructed through modalities like pictures,sounds,music,gestures,smells and so on.With the fast development of multimodal metaphor theory,related studies have sprung up in many fields,including advertisements,comics,posters,music,gestures and special discourse.Among them,co-verbal gestures,a kind of spontaneous gestures accompanying speech,play an important role in communications.As an integral part of discourse,co-verbal gestures are seen as the window to the speaker's thoughts.Some existing research on metaphoric gestures have been conducted in face-to-face conversations,interviews,lectures,however,few of them have touched on the gestural and verbal metaphors used by high-level English learners in English public speaking contests.This thesis follows the MIPVU procedure to identify verbal metaphors and transcribes metaphoric gestures from six perspectives?gesture phase,hand presence,hand shape,palm orientation,movement and the location in gesture space?.By analyzing the gestural and verbal metaphors in six video recordings of the national finals of the“21^st Century Coca-Cola Cup”National College English Speaking Competition,the present study explores the frequency,variety of their metaphor use and the relationship between metaphoric gestures and speech,so as to uncover how Chinese high-level English learners employ verbal and gestural metaphors during English speeches?prepared speeches and impromptu speeches?and Q&A discourse.Around the three above-mentioned questions,the study finds that although there are many verbal-gestural metaphors,monomodal metaphors are still the most frequently used by the contestants,especially verbal metaphors.Lakoff and Johnson's classification of verbal metaphors can be extended to gestural metaphors.Metaphoric gestures in this corpus can be largely divided as ontological,orientational and structural.As for the relationship between metaphoric gestures and words,it is found that they can work together to express the same metaphor,sharing one source and target domain with each other.They may also use different source domains to represent the same target domain.Besides,there are also cases that metaphoric gestures and words do not co-occur but being monomodal themselves in expressing metaphors.The study of metaphoric gestures can further prove that metaphor is cognitive and pervasive,avoiding the circularity problem of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and reflecting the dynamic nature of metaphor.Pedagogically,through analyzing the metaphors used by Chinese high-level English learners in English speaking contests,the present study will provide some implications for language teaching,namely,teachers should not only pay attention to the improvement of students'verbal metaphorical competence,but also add multimodal contents to metaphor teaching practice.