Analysis On Metaphors Under The Windowing Of Attention Theory

The study of metaphors from the perspective of cognition has been supported and developed by more and more scholars,but most of them were confined to the interpretation of words from “Conceptual Integration” and “Conceptual Metaphor”,and rarely analyzed paragraphs or even discourses.The Windowing of Attention theory was proposed by Talmy,which analyzed attention allocation and the prominence and concealment of windowing based on event frames,and had a strong explanatory power for the analysis of discourses.Metaphors enable people to understand one thing in terms of another thing,which is part mapping process from the source domain to the target domain.Some important information is highlighted and others are weakened.In addition,metaphors can represent abstract emotions with the help of concrete things which is called emotional metaphorization.Therefore,the analysis of metaphor mapping mechanisms by Windowing of Attention theory is helpful to better analyze the structure of a text,so as to better understand themes of the discourse.Taking Toni Morrison’s three works,The Bluest Eye,Sula and Beloved as examples,this paper explores the categories of metaphors and working mechanisms of different metaphors under the Windowing of Attention theory.When it comes to quantitative research stage,this paper screens out the metaphors in the three works through MIP,and preliminarily classifies the collected metaphors according to the Windowing of Attention theory to form a corpus.In terms of the qualitative research,the categories of metaphors are further analyzed according to the emotion,and then forms the final classification results.Finally,combining the working mechanism of metaphor and the Windowing of Attention theory,the working mechanisms of various metaphors are explored.After researching,it found a total of 179 metaphors in three works through MIP and the Windowing of Attention theory.Categories of metaphors under Windowing of Attention theory in Toni Morrison’s works are: Hope metaphors and Love metaphors under Open Path Windowing,Anger metaphors and Sadness metaphors under Causalchain Windowing,Sadness metaphors and Anger metaphors under Phase Windowing,Anger metaphors and Sadness metaphors under Participant-interaction Windowing,Love metaphors and Hate metaphors under Interrelationship Windowing.What’s more,working mechanisms of various metaphors include that Hope metaphors under Open Path Windowing highlight the start path and the end path windowing,and Love metaphors under Open Path Windowing highlight the middle path windowing;Anger metaphors under Causal-chain Windowing emphasize causes and results of things,while Sad metaphors under Causal-chain windowing emphasize body movements and results;Sad metaphors under Phase windowing pay more attention to “home phase”,but Anger metaphors under Phase windowing take “away phase” seriously;the triggered scene windowing is opened by using two opposite events to show angry emotions and using two similar events to demonstrate sad emotions by Participant-interaction Windowing;both figures are highlighted rather than grounds in Love metaphors and Hate metaphors under Interrelationship Windowing.