| Recent years has seen the high-speed development of society and economy,which is unfortunately at the high cost of the ecological environment.Since ecological environment is the place for humans to survive and thrive,ecological problems have become the major concerns of all walks of life.In response to ecological deterioration,there was an ‘ecological’ turn in linguistics in the 1970 s,bringing about ‘ecolinguistics’.At the same time,a ‘cognitive turn’ also took place in linguistics,concerning the influence of cognition on language.Cognitive ecolinguistics is an organic combination of cognitive linguistics and ecolinguistics,which mainly discusses the role of language in generating and providing solutions to ecological problems.The Chinese government has always attached great importance to the construction of ecological civilization,and employed numerous metaphors in the discourses on ecological construction to illustrate ecological ideas,such as lüshui qingshan jiushi jinshan yinshan ‘lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets’.Metaphor,as an important cognitive tool and way of thinking,plays an important role in revealing people’s underlying cognitive views and constructing reality.NATURE metaphors take the whole natural environment or natural elements as the tenor,usually employed by humans to show their interaction with nature.From the perspective of cognitive ecolinguistics,this paper takes NATURE metaphors in the discourses on ecological civilization construction as the research object,aiming to reveal the role of NATURE metaphors in generating and dealing with ecological problems.Based on this,this paper raises four research questions: 1)what is the distribution of the source frames of NATURE metaphors in ecological construction discourses? 2)What is the cognitive mechanism of NATURE metaphors? 3)How can NATURE metaphors affect the construction of the ecological environment? 4)Why are these metaphors employed?Oriented by the research questions,this paper adopts the qualitative analysis as the main research method and quantitative analysis as the auxiliary research method.The research data consist of the ecological speeches with the theme of lüshui qingshan jiushi jinshan yinshan,extracted from the Xi Jinping xilie zhongyao jianghua shujuku‘The Database of Xi Jinping’s Major Speeches’.Ant Conc 3.5.7 is used to generate the concordance lines by searching the words in a self-built checking list.Then metaphorical expressions are identified by reading those concordance lines.The research findings are presented as follows: 1)Six types of source frames are employed to structure NATURE domain in the discourses on ecological civilization construction,including ECONOMY frame,ORGANISM frame,PLACE frame,MATERIAL frame,COMPETITION frame and FOOD frame.Among them,ECONOMY frame has the highest frequency while FOOD frame has the lowest one;ORGANISM frame is activated in the most diverse way.People conceptulize nature by mapping the concrete and specific source frame onto the NATURE domain.2)Judged from an ecological view,the majority of NATURE metaphors in ecological construction discourse are ambivalent;some are beneficial;few are destructive.NATURE metaphors affirm the instrumental value of nature,but ignore the intrinsic characteristics of nature.3)People generate and use NATURE metaphors based on their embodied experience and cultural characteristics.Through the analysis of NATURE metaphors from a cognitive ecolinguistic view,theoretically,this paper is committed to promoting the development of cognitive ecolinguistics and enriching the cognitive ecolinguistic research on Chinese metaphors.Practically,it can provide some implications for the construction of ecological civilization through revealing the hidden ecological views of people. |
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