儿童语言中隐喻的认识特点

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3.0 陈辉 2024-11-19 4 4 447.56KB 51 页 15积分
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Introduction
1
Introduction
One of my favorite books is Chien Chong-shu’s masterpiece: Besieged Fortress,
not only because of its attractive plot, but because of its large number of metaphors
used appropriately to convey the abstract meanings that are hard to describe directly.
Later, during my postgraduate study, I chose my supervisor, Professor Wang Bin’s
lectures concerning cognitive science. As a scholar, Prof. Wang has a wide range of
knowledge with thorough and precise logic. His lectures often involve profound and
pioneering linguistic theories which often make the audience puzzled, but as he has
said himself, he has an effective way of making his lectures understandable, no matter
how abstract they are. He is also good at using metaphorical ways! And it’s in his
enlightening lectures that I was deeply attracted by the charm of metaphor’s cognitive
functions.
What impressed me too is that metaphors also appeared frequently in my
daughter’s speech when she was very young. No doubt, metaphor plays a crucial role
in her knowing the new things, which is the same with the history of human being’s
learning about the world.
Metaphor now has been considered to play an important role in human conceptual
system; in other words, human conceptual system is metaphorical in nature (George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980:4). The cognitive function of metaphor determines the
employment of them in children’s speech because of children’s cognitive conditions.
This dissertation will explore not only the existence of metaphors in children’s
speech, but also the characteristics of these metaphors and their links with children’s
intelligence. Maybe children’s caretakers and their family members have found out that
children’s speech is rife with metaphors and children would like to accept metaphorical
ways when they are taught; but the characteristics of these metaphors employed in
children’s speech are still something unknown to many researchers and laymen. The
purpose of this dissertation is trying to prove these distinctive features to achieve
metaphor’s greatest cognitive effects.
Chapter One consists of three parts. Firstly, the author gives a survey of the
studies on metaphor. Secondly, the author will focus on the cognitive functions of
metaphors by giving quite a few real examples. The third part gives a brief introduction
about the development of children’s speech, one of whose main features is
Cognitive Features of Metaphor in Children’s Speech
2
metaphorical.
Chapter Two is made up of two parts. The first part elaborates that children have
to rely on metaphors to know about the world and describe the world, due to their lack
of life experience and language competence, while metaphor acts as a bridge to
transform children from their familiar knowledge to their unknown world, or from
their concrete world to the abstract world. The second part illustrates that children’s
educators choose to use metaphors to teach them new knowledge efficiently.
Chapter Three is mainly concerned about the cognitive features of metaphors in
children’s speech. Because children’s cognitive conditions are different from those of
adults, children’s metaphors belong to similarity-based type, and they are distributed
mainly in word level; besides, children use metaphors passively, not like adults, who
choose metaphors out of communicative strategies.
Chapter Four deals with the metaphoric intelligence which is crucial to children’s
learning efficiency. This chapter may be instructive to exploit children’s intelligences.
On the basis of the illustrations given above, the author will give some
suggestions to exploit children’s metaphoric intelligence in Chapter Five.
At the end of the dissertation, concluding remarks are made with regard to the
previous research and what further research will be done in the future.
To maintain the validity, persuasiveness and liability of my dissertation, all the
data cited in the dissertation come from quite a few sources.
To sum up, the dissertation has two aims. First, the author will illustrate in details
that metaphors appear so frequently in children’s speech that it is necessary to master
the features of them employed in children’s speech. Second, it is hoped to give
suggestions that metaphors will be used as a more efficient tool to develop children’s
cognition and train their abilities on the basis of the characteristics of children’s
metaphors.
Chapter One The Study of Metaphor and Children’s Language Development
3
Chapter One The Study of Metaphor and Children’s
Language Development
§1.1 A Survey of the Studies on Metaphor
For a long time, metaphor was the exclusive domain of literary scholars and the
traditional linguists who were interested in rhetoric and stylistics. And it has
traditionally been based on the notions “similarity” and “comparison” between the
literal and the figurative meanings of an expression. Take the word “eye”extracted
from Shakespeare’s sonnets for example:
…sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines…
and often is his gold complexion dimmed.
(F. Ungerer and H.J. Schmid, 2001:116)
This would mean that the similarity between the category EYE and SUN is
sufficient for the phrase “eye of heaven” to be used in lieu of the word “sun”. For
common attributes of the two categories one might include that both are round, are
perceived as “standing out” from the face or the sky, cover the world with glances or
rays, are open during the day and closed at night, and their appearance can tell us
something about their “background”, i.e. the mood of their owner or the weather.
Traditionally, metaphor was regarded as a speech of language, which is used to
describe things more concretely, vividly and to explain the idea more clearly and
explicitly and sometimes have humorous effect. To some degree, the traditional view
of metaphor makes sense.
John Locke offers us a reason for his negative view of rhetorical metaphor that it
cheats and deceives. He held that it was not proper to use metaphoric language in
scientific articles which need objective and rigid language to depict the nature and
scientific discovery, while metaphor is considered subjective, symbolic, exaggerate and
inaccurate. On the contrary, owing to the development of science and technology, the
invention of new things in sequence and our metaphoric ways of looking at them
prompt the creation of new norms by means of metaphor, that’s to say, word coinage
involves metaphoric extension. Whether in Chinese or in English, there are many
such examples as “
鼠窜，蛇行，鸟瞰，鱼贯，蚕食，席卷
”in Chinese and “manly,
Cognitive Features of Metaphor in Children’s Speech
4
motherly, childlike, hair-like, snow-white, bottleneck” in English, which are all created
metaphorically with the meaning “…like…”. Almost all new words were first created
in the scientific field. The similar examples can be taken from the computer subject,
such as the words “window, desktop, office, surf the net, virus, information highway”
and so on, these words are all metaphoric. And language itself is a mapping from the
source domain—the world to the target domain— the system of signs. So the language
structure is based on how we look at the world. Our use of language is related to our
perception of the things and phenomena around us.
The study of metaphor has shifted in the past 25 or so years out of its traditional
terrain of poetry, literary prose and rhetoric, and into the prosaic world of ordinary
discourse. The first linguist who has made the most comprehensive and most detailed
account of metaphors about its cognitive features was I. A. Richards, according to
whom, in the Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), a metaphor consists of the tenor/topic and
vehicle. The tenor/topic is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is
the subject from which the attributes are borrowed. The corresponding terms to “tenor”
and “vehicle” in George Lakoff’s terminology are target and source. Since Lakoff &
Johnson (1980), the contemporary famous American cognitive linguists suggested that
our thinking, and perhaps even our action, is influenced by the metaphors of everyday
language, research effort has been expended on extracting and analyzing the cognitive
content of metaphor as the carrier of social-culturally constructed representations. (See,
for example, articles by Reddy on language and Schon on social policy in Ortony, 1979;
Novek (1992) on literacy; Musloff et al (1996) on the politics of European
development. Some of this textual analysis has been accompanied by empirical
research into the psycholinguistic or experiential basis of metaphorical language. Their
work has revealed that much metaphorical language is systematic, i.e. there are
systems of metaphors that occur within and across speech events, and that the
metaphor used is often not highly figurative and creative, but it is idiomatic and
conventional. Such prosaic use of metaphor can be seen as lying on a cognitive
continuum with the use of metaphor to generate theoretical models of abstract and
complex ideas in science ( Kuhn, 1962), and on an expressive, aesthetic, continuum
with poetic uses of metaphor.
§1.2 A Powerful Cognitive Tool
Chapter One The Study of Metaphor and Children’s Language Development
5
§1.2.1 Its Appearance in Different Fields
Metaphor in language is pervasive and influential. It is adopted not only in literary
works, but also in politics, geography, economics, mathematics, geometry, sports and
all other fields that can be perceived by the human beings. Even Plato, who is the
forefather of the depreciators of metaphor, viewing it with such disdain as a mere
ornament that he banned it from the brave, new Republic he hoped to found, still chose
a large number of metaphors, fables and fairy tales to illustrate his profound
philosophic ideas and discussed truth in terms of the allegory of the cave, not to
mention Aristotle, Quitillian and Fantanial, the spokesmen of appreciators of metaphor.
And also, everyday language is rife with metaphorical expressions. Most words
denoting body-parts are used in a multitude of metaphorical extensions, such as head
of department/state/government, face of mountain/building, eye of
needle/hurricane/potato, mouth of a hole/river and so on. The above commonplace
expressions represent metaphorical extensions of parts of the body. These examples
show that the human beings tend to use what they are familiar with to substitute for the
new things they meet with, because the first things they know about are their own
bodies, as Chinese saying shows: “
近取诸身，远取诸物
”, which is a basic principle
to get more knowledge of the world.
§1.2.2 A Mapping from Source Domain onto Target Domain
Philosophers and cognitive linguists have shown that metaphors are powerful
cognitive instruments for our conceptualization of abstract categories and new
theoretical or complex ideas. In recent years, there has been a substantial amount of the
study on metaphors. Most scholars hold that metaphoric language comes out of
metaphorical thinking, which is the basic way of our learning about the world.
Metaphor (with myth) helps us to gather the strands that we are, and were, and to
project into the future what will happen. It is with this tool that human beings discover
the world, understand the world, describe the world and explain what they have
experienced to communicate with others. This means metaphors are not just a way of
expressing ideas by means of language, but a way of thinking about things. In the same
vein, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue that we do not just exploit the metaphor “ Time
is money” linguistically, but we actually think of, or conceptualize, the so-called
“target” category TIME via the “source” category MONEY. What the two categories
Cognitive Features of Metaphor in Children’s Speech
6
have in common is that both are valuable commodities and limited resources. And we
in sequence use the following phrases:
1) You are wasting my time.
2) I have invested a lot of time in her.
3) You need to budget your time.
4) We are running out of time.
5) Is that worth your time?
6) You don’t use your time profitably.
(Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 7-8)
Sometimes when a certain category is too abstract or complex and hard to
describe, we will choose some other concrete or our familiar one to make it
understandable easily if we are able to find something in common between them.
Many successful teachers and lecturers have efficient ways of making their lessons or
lectures concerning abstract or advanced theories simple and unforgotten by doing
experiments or using metaphors. Besides, metaphors can be used to illustrate our
experience of the feelings by the virtue of our experience of the physical world. Let us
look at the following examples:
1) In hours of ease, a well-read, charming companion, she was a veritable tower of strength and
arefuge in time of trouble.
2) Coming into their presence is like coming into a sunny room. The dull care or the throbbing
trouble disappears.
3) Since your ship was first launched upon the sea of life, you’ve never been still for a single
moment; the sea is too deep, you could not find an anchor age if you would there can be no
pause until you come into port.
In the above example 1), the pleasant experience of keeping in touch with a
learned and good-tempered companion is revealed by the entity and substance
metaphor: a tower of strength and a refuge. In the example 2), the joy of staying with a
pleasant person is compared to coming into a sunny room, which is still an entity
metaphor. And in example 3), life is full of work, without any interval, like a ship at
sea, never to pause until arriving at its destination. These examples all show that
human beings can describe their experience of the physical or non-physical world in
the light of entity and substance, which can make part of our experience considered as
摘要：

Introduction1IntroductionOneofmyfavoritebooksisChienChong-shu’smasterpiece:BesiegedFortress,notonlybecauseofitsattractiveplot,butbecauseofitslargenumberofmetaphorsusedappropriatelytoconveytheabstractmeaningsthatarehardtodescribedirectly.Later,duringmypostgraduatestudy,Ichosemysupervisor,ProfessorWan...

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作者：陈辉 分类：高等教育资料 价格：15积分 属性：51 页 大小：447.56KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-11-19

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