A Study Of Metaphors And Metonymies Of Sadness In Du Fu’s Poems

As a main form of literature,traditional Chinese poetry has been discussed mainly from literary perspective in the past.Recently,more and more linguistic scholars turn to the study of traditional Chinese poetry trying to interpret it with modern linguistic theories.Traditional Chinese poetry reached its peak in the Tang Dynasty and the greatest poets should be Li Bai and Du Fu.Du had an unstable life.He experienced career failure and drifting life caused by An Shi Rebellion.And thus,his poems are full of emotions and the sadness emotion is especially salient.This is also the reason that this thesis takes Du’s poems as the object of analysis and tries to discuss the emotion metaphors and metonymies from Cognitive Linguistics.This thesis takes “sadness” as an example for analysis of emotion metaphors and metonymies attempting to answer the following three questions:1)What are the sadness metaphors and metonymies in Du’s poems?2)What is the cognitive basis of the sadness metaphors and metonymies in Du’s poems?3)What are the meaning construction processes of sadness metaphors and metonymies in Du’s poems?This thesis has systematically analyzed the sadness metaphors and metonymies in Du’s poems.This thesis has the following findings:Firstly,for conceptual metaphors,the structural metaphors include SADNESS IS A CONTAINER,SADNESS IS THE ENTITY IN A CONTAINER,and SADNESS IS A LACK OF VITALITY.For ontological metaphor,SADNESS is mainly presented as SADNESS IS A PHYSICAL ENTITY.For orientational metaphor,the representation is mainly SADNESS IS DOWN.The conceptual metonymies of sadness emotion in Du Fu’s poems are CAUSE FOR EFFECT and EFFECT FOR CAUSE.The first type includes SOUND FOR SADNESS and COLDNESS FOR SADNESS.The second type includes CRYING FOR SADNESS.Secondly,the sadness metaphors and metonymies in Du’s poems are based on Du’s specific physiological experience and psychological states.Body is closely related to the environment,and the interaction between body and environment motivates the special metaphorical and metonymical expressions in Du Fu’s poems.Based on the embodied experience,concepts like CONTAINER,PHYSICAL ENTITY,THE BREAK OF INTESTINES,THE SOUND OF BATTLE HORNS,and CRYING could be applied to understand the concept of SADNESS.Therefore,there are conceptual metaphors and metonymies related to these concepts.Thirdly,the metaphorical and metonymical meanings of sadness emotion in Du Fu’s poems are constructed by conceptual blending.The process of conceptual blending is the process of mapping between four mental spaces including two input spaces,a generic space and a blended space.For sadness metaphors in Du Fu’s poems,structures and concepts in the input spaces are mapped onto the generic space on the basis of the similarities between the input spaces.Then,the structures and concepts in the generic space are mapped onto the blended space and compressed in the blended space,which would produce the metaphor.The mapping process of sadness metonymies in Du Fu’s poems are similar to the metaphorical process but metonymical mappings are based on contiguity which is presented in the form of causal relationship.The similarity and contiguity are based on the negativeness shared by SADNESS and the source concepts like CONTAINER,DOWN,SOUND,and COLDNESS.The use of emotion metaphors and metonymies depends on the way people perceive the relationships between objects.And by the analysis of emotion metaphors and metonymies,we can have an insight of the cognitive style of human beings.This thesis chooses to analyze the emotion metaphors and metonymies in Du Fu’s poems to explore their cognitive motivations and hopes to provide some references for cognitive studies of metaphors and metonymies in traditional Chinese poetry.