摘 要

隐喻不仅是一种修辞手段，也是一种认知手段。在高级英语的学习中不仅起到修辞的作用，而且可以通过它所具有的认知功能帮助学生更好的理解课文，了解英语国家的文化。随着我们对英语学习的进一步深入，我们应该掌握一些有效学习英语的方法。现在学习英语课本中的隐喻是一种既快又简便的方法。这篇论文旨在分析隐喻的发展过程和隐喻的功能。隐喻的功能从三个方面来进行介绍，包括：修辞功能，委婉的交际功能以及认知功能。

关键词: 隐喻；隐喻功能；隐喻应用

Contents

1. Introduction------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1

1.1 The definitions of metaphor----------------------------------------------------------------1

1.2 The roles of metaphor-----------------------------------------------------------------------2

1. Demonstration-------------------------------------------------------------------------------2

2.1 Rhetorical function--------------------------------------------------------------------------3

2.2 Euphemistic communicative function ----------------------------------------------------5

2.3 Cognitive function---------------------------------------------------------------------------7

3. Conclusion---------------------------------------------------------------------------------10

Works Cited ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------11

Bibliography------------------------------------------------------------------------------------12

Analysis of Metaphors and the application of them

— based on the texts in Advanced English, Book I amp; II

1. Introduction

1.1 Definitions of metaphor

The English word metaphor comes from Greek word metapherein. Metapherein synthesized by Meta and pherein with the meanings of respectively “over” and “carry”, and the composed meaning is “carry over”, since ancient Greek times, people have studied metaphor for more than two thousand years. According to Aristotle, a metaphor is “the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy…” (Aristotle, 2014)

As for definitions of metaphors, different books give different definitions. The definition of metaphor in Oxford advanced learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary Fourth (1997 Edition, 928) : metaphor is the use of a word or phrase to indicate something different from (though related in some way to) the literal meaning, for example, ‘I will make him eat his words’. This sentence doesn’t mean he regard the words as food as the real meaning is that he will keep his promise. The sentence ‘She has a heart of stone’ doesn’t mean that her heart is made up of stone. It means that she is very selfish, arrogant and cold-blooded

Lakoff and Johnson, in the book Metaphors We Live By, state that ‘A metaphor is the expression of an understanding of one concept in terms of another concept, where there is some similarity or correlation between the two.’ (1980)

1.2 The roles of metaphor

Ancient Greek Aristotle in his famous Poetics wrote: Tropes are the application of the name of a thing to something else. In other words, metaphor is a simple displacement. But he also pointed out that metaphor is the figuring trope of all tropes in all the rhetorical.

The famous Roman rhetorician Marcus F. Quintilian had a further understanding of the concept: A noun or a verb is accordingly transferred, as it were, from that place in the language to which it properly belongs to one that there is either no proper word, or in which the metaphorical word is preferable to the proper (Diacritics, 26-37)