A Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Desertion

Abdulrazak Gurnah,a Tanzanian writer,won the Nobel Prize in Literature of the Year in 2021,attracting the attention of global scholars to his novels.They mainly focus on literary connotation,writing style,and values.However,few scholars have studied the metaphorical expressions in Desertion so far.This study aims to explore the following three research questions:(1)What are the main types of conceptual metaphors in Desertion?(2)How are the above metaphors distributed in Desertion?(3)What are the reasons that might contribute to the choice of metaphor in Desertion?With the help of Ant Conc3.4.3w and Oxford Word Smith Tools,this study built the Desertion Corpus(DC)with 98,651 words.Then,this study utilized the metaphor identification procedure MIPVU of Pragglejaz Group(2010)to identify the conceptual metaphors in Desertion.Charteris-Black’s Critical Metaphor Analysis was adopted to analyze the conceptual metaphors in the corpus.The main findings of this study are the following.Firstly,there are three types of conceptual metaphors in Desertion: structural metaphor,ontological metaphor,and orientational metaphor.The source domains of these metaphors are related to many aspects,such as WAR,DEATH,DISEASE,and so on.And the category of HUMAN has the most frequent occurrence,followed by the TOOL category and the CONSTRUCTION category.These conceptual metaphors promote the plot development and depict the character characteristics.Secondly,the STTR of DC is 41.69.The three types of conceptual metaphors have different proportions in Desertion.Structural metaphor is the highest proportion in Desertion at 53.68%,mainly distributed in the first three chapters,the sixth,and the seventh chapters.Ontological metaphor most frequently appears in Chapters 4 and 8,accounting for 36.03%.Orientational metaphor is mainly distributed in the fifth chapter,with the lowest proportion of 10.29%.Finally,the writer’s cognition and the social context of Zanzibar and Britain in the1940 s and 1960 s influence the use and distribution of conceptual metaphors in Desertion.It is expected that this study will provide a conceptual metaphor perspective and corpus-based method for those who intend to study literary works in the future.