| Since its birth,metaphor has been one of the most talked-about topics for well over2,000 years,from ancient Greece to the present.In traditional rhetoric,scholars have developed the comparison theory,the substitution theory and the interaction theory at the lexical level,believing that metaphor is mere embellishment to language.Metaphors We Live By,a book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,was published in 1980.Metaphor,as the authors explain,is a fundamental mechanism of mind,which allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide a better understanding of countless other subjects.The theory of conceptual metaphor points out that the basic working mechanism of metaphor lies in the mapping from the source domain onto the target domain.Since conceptual metaphor was born,researches on metaphors have evolved in terms of intra-linguistics and inter-linguistics.As for inter-linguistics,it embraces anthropology,sociology and politics and the like.However,for intra-linguistics,it shifted from lexical semantics,constructional syntactics to discourse studies.Nowadays,metaphor in discourse is at the frontier of academia,involving metaphor theory,text linguistics and specific inter-disciplines.Scientific discourse is regarded as a special type of discourse,and the information and knowledge conveyed by the discourse are scientific knowledge related to different disciplines and fields.Cognitive Linguistics considers metaphors to be the most basic way and tool of the human cognitive process.Metaphors are part of the common cognitive ability of human beings,which runs through every corner of the human mind.Of course,the construction of knowledge of scientific discourse can be no exception.Although researches have been conducted on scientific discourse,yet it still lacks systematic empirical analysis.Underpinned by the theory of conceptual metaphor,this paper attempts to a mixed research method(quantitative inquiry,qualitative inquiry and case study strategy)to study the basic rule for the construction of metaphor in scientific discourse from a series of popular science works,including biological,astronomical,geographical,physical and chemical discourse and to discover its important roles in terms of scientific discourse as well as scientific knowledge construction.Hence,this paper focuses on the following three problems:1.What kinds of human basic image schema exist in the construction of conceptual metaphor in scientific discourse?2.What kinds and how many conceptual metaphors are included in the five types of scientific discourse?3.What are the roles that conceptual metaphors play in scientific discourse?The study reports the major findings as follows:1.There are three major image schemas behind the selected scientific metaphors,namely,PART-WHOLE schema,CONTAINER schema and PATH schema.When elaborating the elements of life,the part-whole image schema will come into play by providing the readers with prior experiential configuration.Those image schemas are previous recurring bodily or mentally experience stored in our brain and ready to be retrieved,so to speak.Therefore,the underlying image schemas form the foundation of conceptual metaphors in discourse,such as the scientific discourse.2.After constructing the conceptual metaphors in scientific discourse corpus,MIP or the MIPVU version,a metaphor identifying protocol was adopted to code the potential root metaphors and the related tokens.Then,9 types of root metaphors have been uncovered,including “WAR METAPHOR”,“CONTAINER METAPHOR”,“OBJECT METAPHOR”,“HUMAN METAPHOR”,“JOURNEY METAPHOR”,“HOME METAPHOR”,“FAMILY METAPHOR”,“SCALE METAPHOR” and “LIFE METAPHOR”,with a total of 187 metaphor tokens.As for the Lakoffian classification of conceptual metaphors,there are 90 structural metaphors,83 ontological metaphors and 14 orientational metaphors.As a result,structural metaphors and ontological metaphors take up almost all the part of the conceptual metaphors,reporting 48.12%and 44.39% respectively.However,in terms of the root metaphors,the tokens of WAR METAPHOR and OBJECT METAPHOR take up almost 50% of the total number,whereas LIFE METAPHOR is the least frequent one.3.By analyzing the source domain and target domain and the working mechanisms of conceptual metaphors in scientific discourse,the present paper has found that those scientific discourse metaphors help both producers and the readers map the experience from the source domain to the target domain.For example,in terms of WAR METAPHOR,we project the information and knowledge from the field of army,including the regime,the people involved,the training system and commanding and the like to the battle between human immune system and the viruses,germs,or bacteria.By doing this,the abstract or obscure technical terms or concepts become clear.The conceptual metaphor allows us to learn more about the reality.4.To explore the functions of scientific metaphors serve in discourse,the paper has done relatively detailed case studies.By investigating excerpts from the corpus,three functions of the conceptual metaphors in scientific discourse are unfolded before our eyes.One is the conceptual metaphor helps construct the topic or theme of the discourse.Another is the conceptual metaphor establishes the discourse coherence,guaranteeing the smooth flow of the discourse world.The third one is that it is instructive,explaining new terms or concepts in a metaphorical manner,enabling us to interact with the new world.By doing so,the paper not only enriches the theory on discourse analysis to a certain extent,but boosts the scientific development and helps promote the scientific knowledge.Moreover,the systematic study on metaphor constructing has a big influence over scientific discourse writing.However,since scientific discourse involves a myriad of information within different subjects,the present study cannot take all the data into account.Therefore,enlarging the database and making a more comprehensive research do matter. |
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