A Semantic Study Of Vehicles In Chinese Metaphors From The Perspective Of Reference

The vehicle is an important component of a metaphor,and the choice of that greatly influences whether the metaphor is established as well as the basic type of the metaphor.Therefore,the vehicle is crucial for understanding the nature of metaphors.This thesis was based on a self-built metaphorical sentences corpus derived out of The Complete Novels of Lao She.We focused on the denotational meaning of vehicles in Chinese metaphorical sentences from the perspective of denotation studies in cognitive semantics,when clarifying the influences of the semantic and grammatical characteristics of the vehicle on the generating principles and types of metaphorical sentences.It is argued that the essence of metaphor underlies in the acceptance of "typical features(also ’impossible features’)" of the vehicle to the tenor.The vehicle of metaphor can be classified as nominal and predicative according to its grammatical properties.The metaphor can also be classified as thing-like and event-like.In the case of nominal vehicles of thing-like metaphors,the nominal structure is "identifiable" or "nonspecific",but the part of bare noun,could be characterized as“nonreferential”.In addition to the bare noun part,the nominal vehicle of the metaphor contains a modifying qualifier and a quantitative component.They govern the vehicle’s choice of the referent(i.e.,nominal component).The modifying qualifier is mainly to highlight the "typical feature" of the vehicle or to reveal the "distinctive feature" between the tenor and the vehicle,while the quantitative component is mainly to maintain the quantitative-semantic harmony between the tenor and the vehicle.