（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）英语诗歌语篇的隐喻性.pdf

metaphorization in english poetic discourse iv 摘 要 隐喻研究已有两千多年的历史，但是一直囿于修辞领域。传统上隐喻仅仅被 看作是语言的装饰，文学作品的修辞手法之一。20 世纪 80 年代，莱考夫提出的 概念隐喻理论突破了隐喻研究的范畴，提出隐喻不仅仅是一种语言现象，更是人 类普遍的一种思维方式和认知手段。 隐喻的实质是通过另一个事物来说明或理解 某一个事物。随着研究的深入，有不少学者从语篇层面入手研究概念隐喻，发现 概念隐喻具有语篇连贯的功能。 但是， 其中大多数研究仅限于宏观意义上的语篇， 而对具体的语篇， 如与隐喻语言有着密切关系的英语诗歌语篇则鲜有涉及。 因此， 本文借助语篇分析的一些理论，特别是语篇认知连贯理论，在概念隐喻理论的框 架下，对概念隐喻在英诗中的语篇功能，即概念隐喻在构建英诗语篇中起什么作 用，怎样起作用的问题，做一个探讨性的研究。 本文通过对五个英语诗歌语篇进行定性的分析得出结论： 概念隐喻可以帮助 实现英语诗歌语篇连贯。其连贯机制有：通过激活的隐喻蕴涵集实现连贯；通过 一个隐喻、 两个隐喻或者多个隐喻实现连贯； 通过多种隐喻的组合构建语篇连贯。 研究还表明，如果英语诗歌语篇表达的意义与框架、意象图式和脚本等认知模式 相一致，则语篇是连贯的。 关键词：概念隐喻；英语诗歌；语篇连贯；认知连贯；连贯机制 metaphorization in english poetic discourse ii abstract the study of metaphor can be traced back to over 2,000 years ago. but traditionally, metaphor is conventionally regarded as the decoration of language or one of rhetoric devices employed to achieve special linguistic effects in literary works. thus it has been restricted in the field of rhetoric study. lakoff puts forward conceptual metaphor theory in the 1980s, making a breakthrough of this tradition. he brings metaphor study into cognitive field by claiming that metaphor is not merely linguistic phenomenon; more importantly, it is a pervasive thinking mode and a cognitive means of human beings. the essence of metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another. with the development of conceptual metaphor study, some scholars have dealt with conceptual metaphor at the level of discourse and found that conceptual metaphor is a powerful strategy in creating discourse coherence. however, most of such researches deal only with the discourse at the macro level, but let the specific discourse such as the english poetic discourse, which is highly pertinent to metaphorical language untouched. therefore, in the light of some coherence theories, especially the cognitive approach to coherence and within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory, the present thesis is meant to make a tentative study of the discourse functions of conceptual metaphor in english poetic discourse, namely, it tries to provide satisfactory answers to what functions conceptual metaphor has in establishing english poetic discourse and how it constructs the coherence of the discourse. by qualitatively analysis on five english poetic discourses realized by conceptual metaphor, the study arrives at a conclusion that conceptual metaphor can help realize the coherence of english poetic discourse in such working mechanisms: coherence through the activated entailment set of metaphors, coherence within a single metaphor, coherence through two metaphors, coherence through multiple metaphors, and coherence through combination of multiple types of conceptual 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 iii metaphors. it is also proved that if the meaning of the english poetic discourse is consistent with such cognitive models as frames, image schemas, and scripts, stored in world knowledge of human beings, there exists the coherence of the english poetic discourse. key words: conceptual metaphor; english poems; discourse coherence; cognitive coherence; coherent mechanism 中南民族大学 学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的论文是本人在导师的指导下独立进行研究所 取得的研究成果。除了文中特别加以标注引用的内容外，本论文不包含任 何其他个人或集体已经发表或撰写的成果作品。对本文的研究做出重要贡 献的个人和集体，均已在文中以明确方式标明。本人完全意识到本声明的 法律后果由本人承担。 作者签名： 日期： 年 月 日 学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留、使用学位论文的规定，同意 学校保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版，允许论文 被查阅和借阅。本人授权中南民族大学可以将本学位论文的全部或部分内 容编入有关数据库进行检索，可以采用影印、缩印或扫描等复制手段保存 和汇编本学位论文。 本学位论文属于 1、保密，在_年解密后适用本授权书。 2、不保密。 （请在以上相应方框内打“” ） 作者签名： 日期： 年 月 日 导师签名： 日期： 年 月 日 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 i acknowledgements i am deeply grateful for the help of all the people who have cared about this thesis. their kind assistance in one way or another makes a great part of the thesis. above all, i would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor, prof. huang chongzhen, whose intellectual guidance and constant encouragement accompanied me in the past three- year study and in the process of the preparation of the thesis. without her insightful criticisms and enlightening instructions, this thesis would not have come into being. i also owe a very important debt to all the professors and teachers, especially to prof. yuan xuefen, prof. xu ju, prof. lv wanying, prof. zhang liyu, prof. guo linhua and prof. liu zhenai, from whom i have learned a great deal during my three years of postgraduate studies in the college of foreign languages of south- central university for nationalities. their profound knowledge and enlightening academic achievement greatly benefited me. and their lectures proved to be very helpful in the course of developing this thesis. last but not least, my acknowledgement is also extended to my parents whose loving support and continuous encouragement helped me through the most difficult time in my life. 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 1 chapter 1 introduction 1.1 poetic metaphor: from rhetorical tradition to cognitive perspective the systematical study of metaphor can be traced back to the ancient greek philosopher aristotle, whose definition of metaphor as transference of lexical meaning for achieving rhetorical and poetical value set the tone for scores of generations in their poetic metaphor study. for a long time, poetic metaphor has been seen as a topic of interest exclusively for rhetoricians, not different from any other figures of speech such as metonymy, personification, hyperbole and synecdoche. it is used to be investigated into by stylisticians and literary critics, with their focus on the function that metaphor performs to the bringing about of poetic diction. despite alexander pope s warnings against the overuse of far- fetched imageries and wordsworth s commitment to the use of every man s speech, metaphor is generally considered the chief characteristic of poetry. traditionally metaphor is regarded as the decoration or ornament of poetry, a kind of rhetoric devices. and attention is consequently paid to the linguistic features such diction, special grammatical inflections and metrical patterns (yan shiqing, 1999, p. 106). in sharp reaction to the rhetorical tradition, lakoff and turner (1989) argue in more than cool reason: a field guide to poetic metaphor from the cognitive perspective that “ poetic metaphor far from being ornamentation, deals with central and indispensable aspects of our conceptual systems” (p. 215). through their empirical, scientific study of language and thought, especially through the systematical analysis of metaphor in the western poems, lakoff and turner claim that poetic metaphor, as the extensions of conceptual metaphor, is a matter of thought rather than words. “ metaphor is a conceptual matter often unconscious and that metaphorization in english poetic discourse 2 conceptual metaphors underlie everyday language as well as poetic language” (p. 136). “ general conceptual metaphors are thus not the unique creation of individual poets but are rather part of the way members of a culture have of conceptualizing their experience” (p. 9), thus to understand poetic metaphor is inseparable from culture and experience. great poets can speak to readers because they use the modes of thought readers all possess. thus, to understand the nature and value of poetic creativity requires us to understand the ordinary ways people think. 1.2 rationale of this research since the 1930s, metaphor, once a traditional topic for stylistics and literary studies has recently attracted the increasing attention of philosophers, linguistics, psychologists, and is generally regarded as a testing ground for theories of meaning in particular and theories of language comprehension in general. what impresses us most is that the cognitive tradition of metaphor studies has been revitalized and with the strong claims that people think metaphorically (lakoff if the meaning of a discourse is congruent with a certain cognitive model, the discourse is thus coherent (zhang delu zhang pei, 2004; dong hongle, 2005; wei zaijiang, 2006). all these observations and speculations have justified the ground for the present exploration of how metaphors work in english poetic discourse. specifically, the present study proceeds to explore how metaphors structure the english poetic discourse, by resorting to discourse analysis as a general framework, and some pertinent theories or models in cognitive language, and try to find out some structuring mechanisms of metaphor in english poetic discourse. 1.3 purposes of this research on the basis of the studies of the forerunners mentioned above, the present thesis attempts to make a tentative study of metaphor as a dynamic process rather than as a static product in english poetic discourse, as the title “ metaphorization in english poetic discourse” suggests, or stated differently, the study applies lakoff s metaphorization in english poetic discourse 4 theory of conceptual metaphor and the cognitive approach to explore the coherent mechanisms of metaphor in english poetic discourse in a totally new perspective compared with the traditional rhetorical approach. it aims at answering the following questions which are closely related in nature: (1) what is the relationship between conceptual metaphor and discourse coherence of english poetry? (2) if conceptual metaphor helps to realize discourse coherence of english poetry, by which mechanisms the coherence is achieved? and what is the relationship between the mechanisms and cognitive models such as frame, schema, script, and etc.? the significance of the study lies in pushing forwards the interdisciplinary study of metaphor in english poetic discourse. it is also of great importance to develop the reader s “ metaphorical eye” and evoke the interest in appreciating and creating poetry, thus to improve the humanity quality. 1.4 methodology for this research metaphor in use is a complex socio- cultural and psycholinguistic phenomenon that requires the application of multiple investigative methods triangulation from large corpora, empirical studies of reactions, introspection and theory that accommodates gradedness, prototypicality, relativisation to discourse context and social groups (camerson, 2001, p. 28). with a full awareness of the complexity and difficulty of metaphor study, this thesis will try to adopt some methods appropriate for the present research. the present study is theory- driven rather than data- driven, for it is motivated by the claims and assumptions of conceptual metaphor and cognitive theory of discourse analysis. consequently, the thesis will apply the cognitive theory of discourse analysis 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 5 framework to poetic metaphor with the accompaniment of conceptual metaphor hypothesis. as is obvious from the topic poetic metaphor, the metaphors the study will resort to in illustrating the metaphoricity of poetic language are taken from english poetry, including those from works produced by english- native poets. the analysis on data collected is largely speculative and qualitative. 1.5 framework of the thesis this thesis falls into five chapters. the ongoing chapter (chapter 1) gives a general introduction to the present study, covering the issues of researching target poetical metaphor, rationale and purposes of the research, and methodology to be adopted in the research. chapter 2 will be devoted to historically reviewing metaphor studies closely related to the present research. chapter 3 will give the theoretical analyses of conceptual metaphor and of discourse coherence, attempting to build up a theoretical framework to metaphors in english poetry discourse. it focuses on introducing several cognitive models that helps to realize discourse coherence, paving the way for the next chapter, chapter 4. as the main part of this study, chapter 4 attempts to find out the coherent mechanisms of metaphors in english poetry discourse. it is mainly concerned with five mechanisms: coherence through one conceptual metaphor and its entailment, coherence through a single metaphor, coherence between two metaphors, coherence through multiple conceptual metaphors, and coherence through the combination of multiple types of conceptual metaphors. chapter 5 draws a brief of the study, outlining its main achievements and limitations, pointing to the direction in which future research can be carried out. metaphorization in english poetic discourse 6 chapter 2 a brief account of metaphor study metaphor study, as suggested in the previous chapter, has been subjected to considerable scrutiny by foreign and domestic scholars whose publications involving with the topic were productive and voluminous. thus the task of reviewing theories of metaphor proposed in the bulk of metaphor literature published in the past would be enormous and impossible in the present thesis. therefore what the thesis needs to do is to make careful choice so as to ensure that the selected literature is highly pertinent to its research topic. actually, the objective of the study to explore the coherence of metaphor in english poetic discourse has already set tone for the review work. for convenience, the thesis is supposed to review the previous study on the metaphor abroad and in china. 2.1 study abroad metaphor study abroad goes back to western traditional rhetoric and poetics. in ancient greece, metaphor was a concept in the domain of rhetoric. the tradition directly descended from aristotelian theory produced two major schools of metaphor theories the substitution theory and the comparison theory until the 1930s when the interaction theory was put forward by richards. the interaction theory developed by black finally break away the rhetoric chain and begins to recognizes the cognitive value of metaphor, thus paves the way for the emergence of the cognitive theory, among which the theory of conceptual metaphor (will be discussed in chapter 3) is the most famous and influential. 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 7 2.1.1 substitution theory the concept of “ substitution theory” , which is claimed to be directly from aristotelian theory, and defines metaphor as “ renaming” of the topic by the vehicle, is formally put forward by m. f. quintilian (1953) who summarizes aristotle s idea that metaphor is replacing one word with another actually. this characteristic can be suggested by the classic definition by aristotle in his poetics: metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on the ground or on the ground of analogy. (poetics, chap. 21) the definition indicates that an object is named a, but the name a is not used; instead the name of another object b is used to substitute for it. b has its own meaning, but it gets a new meaning after it is used as a substitution in this way. as far as the function of metaphor, is concerned, aristotle claims that metaphor adds charm to diction: “ metaphor is a kind of dignifying, enlivening ingredient, a set of unfamiliar usage which, by the very fact of not being normal idiom, can raise the diction above the level of the common people” (hawkes, 1980, p. 8). meanwhile, aristotle emphasizes the function of metaphor to fill in a semantic lacuna (ricoeur, 1977). however, he argues that metaphor violate the principle of explicitness and should be restricted to poetry only; otherwise it is almost a vice of language. his viewpoint gives rise to the distinction between poetic diction and everyday language in later ages. according to the aristotelian theory, ricoeur (1977) summaries three obvious features of the substitution theory: (1). metaphor is considered as something that happens only to the noun. in connecting metaphor to noun as against to discourse, aristotle constrains the direction of the history of metaphor studies for 2,000 years. on the one hand, confining metaphor as metaphor as one of the “ word- focused figures of speech” (p. 16) leads to an extreme refinement in taxonomy. on the other hand, the piece it carries is also high, metaphorization in english poetic discourse 8 because “ it becomes impossible to recognize a certain homogeneous functioning that operates at all the strategic levels of language words, sentences, discourse, texts, style” (p. 17). (2). metaphor is regarded as a kind of transference, a movement from one location to another. it is a kind of displacement. (3). metaphor is the transposition of a deviant noun “ that belongs to something else” . the term deviant is opposed to ordinary or current, which, according to aristotle, refers to “ used by everybody” , or “ in general use in a country” . the implication is therefore metaphor is neither used by everybody nor in general use in a country, i.e. metaphor is deviation from the ordinary mode of working of language. it follows that the use of metaphor is close to the use of strange, ornamental, or coined terms. 2.1.2 comparison theory comparison theory of metaphor is a special case of substitution theory. is also known as similarity theory or analogy theory, for the literal equivalent to the metaphor is held to be a comparison, or a state of similarity. according to comparison theory, the presupposition that the two terms in each domain share similar attributes or meanings gives rise to the analogical relations. the attributes must have logical priority over the metaphorical process. they must exist before the hidden analogy is discovered. it is the existing properties that help understand other objects more clearly. comparison theory shares a common basis with the institution one, i.e. metaphor i