A Cognitive Approach to Expressions of English Metaphors

Abstract

This paper analyses the three expressions of English metaphors: nominal metaphors; verbal metaphors; adjective metaphors from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. For nominal metaphors, the author starts from metaphorical mapping mechanism, interpreting the different syntactic features of them: as a subject, an object, a predicate, an appositive and a possessive, figuring out the reasons for producing nominal metaphors and its cognitive approach. For verbal metaphors, this paper has, in detail, analyzed three different categories of them: the verbal metaphors with a logical subject predicate collocation; the ones with a logical verb, object collocation; and with a logical subject, predicate, object collocation with the above three kinds of linguistic theories, obtaining the forming mechanism of the verbal metaphors and its working ways in languages. For the adjective metaphors, this paper mainly applies the mapping theory between a source domain and a target domain in Conceptual Integration Theory. A comprehensive, detailed and systematical analysis of adjective meanings in basic adjective metaphors and metaphorical combinations of basic adjectives leads to the following conclusion: the combination of basic adjective metaphors is the result of the “Least Effort Principle” with characteristics of simplicity and popularity. In addition, it also possesses the capability to produce richer metaphorical expressions.