词汇学作业

《英语词汇学》期末接结课论文A study on metaphor in semantic shift

The word can be used by literally or figuratively to show its meaning, which are called literal meaning and figurative meaning respectively. When a word has transferred from literal meaning to figurative meaning, then it has experienced the semantic shift. Semantic shift includes metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, transferred epithet, synaesthesia and onomatopoeia. Every one of them have experience the semantic shift.

Among these, the concept of metaphor plays an important role in the process of human’s understanding and reforming the world. Its birth and development has interrelationship with that of culture. The similarity of metaphor in different language is based on human’s common function of physiology and psychology, living environment, etc. The culture-specific aspects such as the particular religion, custom, history, and geography, turn out to be the main cause of the difference usage of metaphor in different language. So, it is very necessary for us to learn the different meaning of words which have experienced the semantic shift, especially the metaphorical shiftment of meaning.

What is metaphor? Prior to answering the question, I must mention some of its history. The English word “metaphor” derives from Greek word “metaphora”. It is composed by “meta” and “pherein”, which has respective meaning as “over” and “to carry”. Hence the original meaning of “metaphora” was “to carry over”. Aristotle, perhaps the first sch olar to define metaphor, argues “Metaphor is the application to one thing of a name belonging to another thing”. However, this version of definition is only confined to the subject of rhetoric while metaphor nowadays is no longer considered as only connected to literature classes, rather, it is omnipresent. Brown (1976), a specialist in the sociology of art, notes that metaphors provide a perspective on knowledge just as scientific paradigms provide a perspective on theoretical knowledge. Some other famous sentences are as follows:

“To know is to use metaphor.”—Friquegnon

“The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”—Emerson

“Metaphor was the beginning of wisdom, the earliest scientific method.”—C.Day-Lewis

Among the innumerable definitions of metaphor in recent years, the one presented by Lakoff (in Ortony, 1993:203) is quite notable. He holds the sense of metaphor as a cross-domain mapping, a way of thinking. For instance, “love” and “war” are two completely different “domains”, but we can use wo rds used to depict war to describe love. Hence, we have the metaphor “He wins her over in the game of love”.

In our text book, according to the likeness between two objects, using one object to refer to another is called metaphor. Metaphor is based on likeness and association, so no matter which two objects, having outside, inner, or special similarity, they can use metaphor, or say they can refer to each other for metaphor. For example: we can say the teeth of a comb because there is the similarity between teach and comb.

The basis of metaphor consists in one similarity between two objects, just because of this basis, we can use one to replace of the other. The so called similarity can include three kinds of situations: the similarity of appearance, the similarity of the function and the similarity of the connotation.

The appearance means that the two objects have a likeness of their shape. There are many examples for this kind of situation: forest can be use as a forest of chimneys, or a forest of red flags; the word neck can be used as the neck of a gourd, or the neck of a bottle. All of these actions are based on the similarity of their shaps.Functional similarity refers to the likeness of the usage of