汉语语句中不及物动词的字面义和常规隐喻义的脑加工机制-外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文.docxVIP

MA D MA Dissertation of Chongqing University Chapter One Introduction PAGE PAGE 10 Chapter One Introduction Metaphor is a very important component of our daily verbal interaction. Maybe we are not conscious of each sentence of what we are saying every day, but if we record it and then read it again, we may find that metaphor is everywhere. According to Richards (1936), there is one metaphor in almost every three sentences in our daily conversation. In Western Europe, the old question about “what on earth is metaphor?” can be traced back to the ancient Rome, and the first one who did the systematic and theoretical discussion about metaphor is Aristotle. There are various definitions, examples and thoughts about metaphor in his “Ars Poetica” and “Ars Rhetorica”. Metaphor is considered as a figure of speech and a conventional language skill. Aristotle’s theory dominated the whole thinking about the nature of metaphor for many centuries and up to 20 century, Richards (1936) and Black (1955) introduced a new idea on metaphor. This is a big step for metaphor research in linguistics and on this basis, Lakoff, Johnson and Turner proposed the cognitive approach, conceptual structure, which contends that metaphor is not special but rather the core of ordinary language, indeed at the core of human experience. Different from Lakoff’s view, Searle’s speech act theory holds the idea that metaphor does not pertain to words or sentences per se, but to what a speaker means when he utters words or sentences. This is from the view of pragmatics. The above theories give us a general idea about the nature of metaphor and the researches about metaphor have mushroomed on a series of issues like: What is metaphor? How metaphor is processed? Is metaphor processed with different mechanism from literal languages? How about the brain location in metaphor processing? However, argument in linguistics field has its own weakness which makes no final result that is convincing. This favor to meta