The study of metaphor in the west has a history of more than 2000 years. Represented by traditional rhetoric, metaphor is regarded as a rhetoric way at the word level, which deviates from the normal language rules in structure and form. At the end of 1970s, there was a "metaphor revolution", and the perspective of metaphor research gradually expanded from linguistic pragmatics to cognitive thinking.
Metaphor is promoted to the level of "cognitive style" and "reasoning mechanism" to understand. Metaphor is conceptual, not linguistic. Metaphor is the result of systematically mapping one conceptual domain to another through individual cognition and reasoning. The essence of metaphor is to understand and experience the current thing through another thing, which is a cognitive activity.
It is not a rhetorical phenomenon, not only in language, but also in activities and concepts. It is universal, cognitive and systematic. The study of metaphor in the East has a longer history than that in the West. As early as the pre-Qin period, Confucius pointed out the importance of metaphor to thinking. Mozi and others believe that metaphor is to use what you know to explain what you don't know.
What are the main forms of metaphor in speeches?
In written expression, "Bi" and "Xing" involve the cross-domain expression of concepts, which is also a metaphor. The outstanding feature of China's interpretation of metaphor in ancient times is that "Bi" and "Xing" are more like a metaphor than a rhetorical device. With the spread of western cognitive metaphor theory, domestic scholars gradually explain the connotation of metaphor from a cognitive perspective.
It is believed that metaphor is a common phenomenon in language, not only a rhetorical way, but also indispensable in the development of language and thinking. Metaphor in speech is mainly expressed through lexical meaning. From the perspective of language composition, there are two forms of expression: lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor. Metaphors of Chinese vocabulary are mainly embodied in two aspects: word formation metaphor and semantic metaphor.