A Study Of Identifying Metaphor Under The Framework Of Lexical Priming Theory

Metaphor is an essential phenomenon that widely appears in English,which is pivotal to English teaching and L2 acquisition.This study aims to explain the creation,identification and comprehension of metaphor under the framework of Lexical Priming Theory through a study of ablaze.The theoretical foundation of the thesis is Lexical Priming Theory,which is put forward by Michael Hoey,an American linguist,in 2005.This research uses British National Corpus(BNC)to analyze ablaze.Its concordance lists are all extracted from BNC.Through both quantitative method and qualitative method,priming features of every sense in terms of collocates,semantic associations,pragmatic associations,and colligational patterns are analyzed and compared.AntConc 3.5.8 is employed in this study to observe the behavior of the lexical item.According to the Cambridge International Dictionary of English with Chinese Translation,ablaze is an adjective with three senses:(1)burning very strongly;(2)brightly lit or brightly colored;(3)full of energy,interest or emotion.After illustrating the priming features of ablaze from the framework of Lexical Priming Theory proposed by Hoey,which refers to collocation,semantic association,pragmatic association and colligational patterns,it is found out that senses of ablaze have different preference in collocations and semantic associations.They tend to be primed by different contextual markers and used in distinctive grammatical patterns as well.Influenced by the above priming features,this lexis creates three metaphors:"COLOR is FIRE","LIGHT is FIRE" and "EMOTION is FIRE"This fact appropriately shows that metaphorical meaning is created after changing the priming features in the original meaning.These distinctions in priming features can in turn be used to identify and comprehend metaphors.This research mainly made three contributions.First of all,this thesis provides a fresh perspective to study metaphor by applying lexical priming theory,which explicitly explains the creation and identification of metaphoric language.Secondly,this study adopted a corpus-based approach to studying metaphoric expressions of lexis,which is scientific and convincing enough to researching metaphor,making the fuzzy language phenomenon clear.Lastly,the investigation into words from the perspective of lexical priming theory enables teachers to teach words in new ways and help students improve their English levels.