论隐喻产生的语言认知和文化原因.doc

论隐喻产生的语言，认知和文化原因 论隐喻产生的语言，认知和文化原因 　　Ⅰ.Introduction 　　How does metaphor come out? Due to the limitation of thinking ability or lack of existed words or expressions, human bEings have to use another thing to talk about something while cognizing changing objects, which means that they must use metaphor as their cognitive measure. The emergence and use of metaphor is a common phenomenon of natural language. Traditional metaphor theory takes metaphor as a kind of linguistic phenomenon, which is a kind of rhetoric phenomenon for modifying the utterance. However, metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, more important is a kind of phenomenon of human cognition. Linguistic metaphor occurs on various linguistic levels and takes words or sentences as its ‘focus’ and context as its ‘frame’. Whether a metaphor has occurred and how it should be interpreted is entirely dependent on context. The essence of metaphor is to comprehend and experience one thing through another. Therefore, in a manner of speaking, metaphor is semantic interaction of the two cognition fields. 　　Ⅱ.How does Metaphor Emerge? 　　Metaphor is a comprehensive linguistic phenomenon. It is the natural development of thinking and language. When people’s thinking developed to a certain stage, it has not satisfied understanding and expression for specific things, but need to cognize, think and express some abstract concepts and thoughts. At this time, people did not endlessly create new words, but associated the new abstract concepts with their known matters, and found the similarity between each other, thus using the existing knowledge to think about and express the new concept. As a result, emerged the projection between two cognitive domain, and a metaphorical language is formed. 　　Ⅲ.Language and Metaphor 　　Metaphor is a kind of language phenomenon. In the strict sense isolated word cannot be called a metaphor. Only in specific context can tell if a word is used as a metaphor. Metaphor is