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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 The background of the study
The studies of metaphor can date back to Plato and Aristotle times, more than twothousand years ago, and Richards and Black give an extended study of metaphors. At first,metaphor has been considered as merely a matter of language. Aristotle has given adefinition to metaphor-- “consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to somethingelse" (Ricoeudr, 1975, 13). In Aristotle's two works--Poetics and Rhetoric and Poetics,metaphor has been identified as a figure of speech, so metaphor in that time is merelylimited to literature and rhetoric. In 1970s, Richards raised the theory of interactionism inhis writing--The Philosophy of Rhetoric, and he is the first one who studied metaphor fromthe cognitive view systematically. So it was a history turn that the research of metaphorchanges from rhetoric, pragmatic views to cognitive view.Metaphor is a common phenomenon in our daily life. The British rhetorician I. A.Richards (Richards, 1936:98) esteemed that there will be one metaphor in almost everythree sentences in our daily discourse. While according to Lackoff & Johnson, about 70%of our daily discourses come from metaphorical concepts. Metaphor is a crucial cognitivetoll for human beings to conceptualize the abstract domains (Ungerer & Smith,1996:114).Metaphor is the sole way to understand cognitive capability for human beings, and theessential method to solve the difficulties of understanding and learning language. (May,1993:301). Thus metaphors play a very important role in the processes of understandingand describing the world.
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1.2 Significance of the research
This paper has both theoretical and practical significance.Since 1903, scholars have studies metaphors from many perspectives such asphilosophy, sociology, psychology, pragmatism, etc. And the previous study of metaphormerely focuses on the lexical and sentential level of language. At present, a lot scholarsstart to switch their researches to metaphors at the discourse level. In fact, metaphor can beconsidered as a textural strategy and contributes a lot to discourse construction. But thereare fewer researches on cohesive role of conceptual metaphor in news reports. This paper isto analyze the cohesive functions of conceptual metaphor in news reports from thecognitive perspective systematically. To be more specifically, the study of this thesis isbased on English news reports which are involved metaphors. On the one hand, this thesisis to show a comprehensive overview of conceptual metaphors in the selected samples inorder to reveal how these metaphors are formed. On the other hand, it detailedly analyzes the samples selected from news reports to reveal the cohesive functions of conceptualmetaphors.Meanwhile, this thesis may help pressmen cultivate metaphorical awareness.Metaphors arise here and there in news reports, and it is an essential tool for them to formnew terms and fresh representations in news discourses. But rare journalists are able toconcern the importance and influence of metaphors, so this paper aims to indicate thepower and importance of metaphors in constructing and understanding news reports. Inaddition, it is to make pressmen to pay enough attention to cultivate their metaphoricalawareness in constructing and reading news discourses to convey valid information andfi本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。