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ear’ are transferred to a concrete image likes the gas. This pattern is greatly used in the press and the literature as rhetoric devices to strengthen the author’s opinion and to impress readers deeply. 2.3 The categories of English metaphor Since the study on metaphor can be traced back to Aristotle, the first one who studied metaphors systematically. There has been a history of more than two thousand years study on metaphor, up till now numerous people make their great efforts to research on metaphor from various angles; therefore, metaphor can be classified in many ways according to the angles it was studied from. 2.3.1 Classifications at the rhetoric level I ) The dead metaphor and the live metaphor From its rhetoric effect, metaphor can be sorted into two categories: one is the genuine metaphor or the live metaphor, and the other is the trite metaphor or dead metaphor. As we know, the basic function of metaphor mentioned before is to transfer a special quality from one thing to the other to make much more concrete, impressive, profound images. However those which were used from time to time with its rhetoric effect declining gradually to zero would be regarded as the common expression, melting into the language, and then they would become out-of-date expressions, which is what we called the dead metaphor, such as ‘the bonnet of a car’, ‘a coat of pain’, ‘the teeth of a saw’, ‘the apple of one’s eyes’, ‘rain cats and dogs’. On the other hand, the live metaphor refers to those with freshness and originality and effect. However, the disadvantage of this kind of classification is that it is too vague and difficult to define the boundary between the live metaphor and the dead metaphor. For example it is hard to decide to sort ‘the heart of China, Beijing’ into the dead metaphor or the live metaphor. II) Peter Newmark’s classification From Peter Newmark’s view A Textbook of Translation, ‘I have suggested elsewhere that there are four types of metaphor: fossilized, stock, recently created and original’. [6]P46 From the beginning, the fossilized, the name itself is a metaphor. It literally means to become a fossil; actually it means the trite, our-of-date, merely used. In a sense, it is just the same as the dead metaphor in the first classification. Take ‘rain casts and dogs’ as an example. Nowadays those who used this metaphor are regarded as the people who live in the generation before the grandfather. The stock refers to the metaphors that have been taken in the dictionaries for the usage of metaphorical meanings and are still frequently used in daily life. Here are some examples of the stock about the metaphorical usage of the word ‘flood’. (17) She was in a flood of tears. (18) The corridors were flooded with girls. (19) Strawberries flooded the market and prices dropped down (20) Beer flooded from the glass There are the recently created metaphors which have not yet been adopted in the dictionary but can be accepted the common people with a feeling of refreshness. In Hamiton’s Rescue of A Newborn there are sentences [7]P47 as follows. (21) I focused on a small blob in the mud amid the columns of legs and trunks. (22) I suddenly came upon a wall of feeling elephants. (23)…grabbed their lost baby and tugged her gently into a stockade of legs In the above three sentences, ‘columns’ and ‘wall’, ‘stockade’, have double functions. They function as the measure words with the metaphorical meanings, which has not yet been ado