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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Metaphor is such a pervasive language phenomenon that it is the focus of thestudy by many linguists and scholars all the time. First of all, in the west, metaphor isonly considered as a rhetorical phenomenon in the traditional study, and it is usuallyexcluded from the scope of conventional language study. There are two approaches tostudy metaphor during that time. One is the comparison theory which is developed byAristotle. He puts forward a definition of metaphor, that is, “metaphor consists ingiving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being eitherfrom genus to species, or from species to species; or on grounds of analogy”(Aristotle, 1954: 63). The comparison theory states that there is a similarity betweentenor and vehicle. Another is the substitution theory which regards metaphor as thesubstitution of a metaphorical expression for the literal one. Then the study onmetaphor did not change from a matter of rhetorical device into a matter of thoughtuntil Richards put forward interaction theory in 1936. That’s to say, since thenscholars have started to pay attention to metaphor from the perspective of semanticsand pragmatics. And then Richards' theories are developed by Black, Lakoff, Johnson,Turner and so on. Black and Richards focus on the rules and characteristics of theinteraction of metaphor, and argue that metaphor is the process of producing a newmeaning. The interaction theory not only castes lights on the cognitive value ofmetaphor but also hails the advent of a brand new cognitive approach to studymetaphor. Metaphor has moved towards the way of multi-discipline studies:linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, education, as well as literarycriticism and rhetoric since 1960s (Shu, 2000:7). Lastly, many researchers have begunto regard metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon instead of just a linguisticphenomenon and a device of rhetoric since the book Metaphors We Live By waspublished. Lakoff and Johnson feel convinced that metaphor is the fundamental ofhuman’s perception of the external world, permeating in human language andconceptual development. The essence of metaphor is that it allows us to understandand experience one kind of things, which we are unfamiliar with and difficult to talkabout, in terms of another (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). From then on, more and morescholars focus their study on conceptual metaphor.
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1.2 Significances of the Research
This study has significances in both theory and practice.Theoretically, on the one hand, systematic study is conducted on English prosesin this thesis. It is systematic not only because it presents a comprehensive overviewof conceptual metaphors in the selected proses to shed light on what discoursefunctions conceptual metaphor performs in proses, but also because it makes anelaboration on how conceptual metaphors contribute to discourse functions. On theother hand, this thesis provides more modes of analyzing cohesive function ofconceptual metaphor and finds out more patterns of constructing coherence. At thesame time, this study provides a new perspective for the study of metaphor andfurther enriches and perfects metaphor theory. Last but not the least, it furtherenriches the contents of discourse studies and expands the scope of the study oflanguage reviews.
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