A Cognitive Approach To Metaphors In Children’s Picture Books

Based on monomodal metaphor and multimodal metaphor theories proposed by Forceville and Piaget’s children’s cognitive development theories,this thesis explores whether and how cognitive metaphors used in children’s picture books match Piaget’s children’s cognitive development stages in the process of decoding the texts and illustrations for children readers of two different stages: the preoperational stage(3-6 years old)and the concrete operational stage(7-9 years old).To be specific,this thesis will discuss the issues below:1)Do the verbal metaphors in the Tales of Beatrix Potter match children’s cognitive development? How?2)Do the pictorial metaphors in the Tales of Beatrix Potter match children’s cognitive development? How?3)Do the visual metonymies in the Tales of Beatrix Potter match children’s cognitive development? How?After a careful review of the related study and an introduction to the theoretical foundation,the author presents a detailed analysis of examples from six works of the Tales of Beatrix Potter,a well-known classic series of children’s picture books.Firstly,the elements of verbal messages and images depicted in the specific example are given to have a better understanding of the context information.Then the author identifies metaphors and metonymies in the Tales of Beatrix Potter by focusing on what features of the source domain are projected to the target domain.Moreover,the cognitive function of using metaphors within the text and the picture is investigated.Lastly,how children in the preoperational stage and the concrete operations stage interpret pictures and verbal messages in the Tales of Beatrix Potter are analyzed respectively.The study found that metaphors used in the Tales of Beatrix Potter match Piaget’s children’s cognitive development stages.As a whole,the metaphors in the tales invite and help children of different age groups to tap their cognitive potentials by providing imaginative room and cognitive means with concrete images either in words or pictures.