More than two thousand years ago, metaphor was known to the world as a rhetorical device. In the west, Aristotle systematically studied metaphor in his works Poetics and Rhetoric, which laid the basic clues for the study of metaphor in western rhetoric circles in the next two thousand years. Nowadays, people at home and abroad have done a lot of research on metaphor, and in recent years, there are hundreds of related papers in China. The traditional metaphor theory is only limited to the study of metaphor itself, and does not put metaphor in the larger context of human cognition, thinking and communication activities, so it cannot fully explain the mechanism and essence of metaphor. Contemporary cognitive theory of metaphor holds that metaphor is not only a rhetorical phenomenon, but a basic and universal cognitive way for human beings to know the world, which can be used to explain the formation of people's concepts, the process of thinking, the development of cognition and the basis of behavior.

Through the analysis of relevant statistical data, we find that from the research trend, domestic metaphor research shows an obvious upward trend; From the research content, domestic research mainly focuses on the introduction of foreign research results and the study of metaphor theory; From the research point of view, 90% of domestic research is mainly from the cognitive point of view, which shows that cognitive science has become the main perspective of metaphor research; Moreover, metaphor research has begun to expand from single English to other languages. Therefore, the study of metaphor has just started in China, and there is great room for the future study of metaphor in both breadth and depth.