摘 要

现如今，对隐喻的研究已经从修辞手段发展为认知方式，并且，它的应用领域也从语言学领域拓宽到了文学领域。本文尝试从概念隐喻的角度来分析一部经典的文学作品《堂吉诃德》中的荒诞场景和主要人物。通过探求源域（作者自身的经历和写作背景）与目标域（小说中的主要人物与情节）之间的映像，使读者对这部小说能有一个更好的理解和回顾。

关键词：隐喻，源域，目标域，《堂吉诃德》

Contents

1. Introduction 1
2. Demonstration 2
   1. Theoretical Framework 2
      1. Development of Conceptual metaphor 2
      2. Structure of Conceptual metaphor 3
   2. The application of conceptual metaphor in Don Quixote 4
      1. The reflection of the author 4
      2. The reflection of historical background 6
      3. The reflection of feudal images 8
3. Conclusion 9
   1. The enjoyment of readers 9
   2. The expression of author’s emotion 9
   3. The significance of metaphor’s application in literary works 10

Works Cited 11

Bibliography 12

A Conceptual Metaphorical Study on Don Quixote

Introduction

There is a point of view in cognitive linguistics that: metaphorical thinking ability is a creative thinking ability, which occurs with the development of people's cognition; is the advanced stage of cognitive development and also a kind of cognitive ability for people to know the world, especially to recognize abstract things (Zhao 29). The conceptual metaphor theory was first proposed in Lakoff and Johnson's book Metaphors We Live By. The conceptual metaphor theory they referred to in the book is an influential theory, and the core of this theory is: metaphor is considered as a means of cognition; metaphor is a systematic mapping across conceptual domains; the use of conceptual metaphor is subconscious… Metaphor, let people give full play to their imagination and creativity.

Metaphor depends on culture, and culture is embodied in literary works. Excellent literary works reflect not only a simple story, but also the author's ideas. The metaphors in a literary work not only give the readers more reading pleasure, but also express the ideas that the author cannot express under the background of the times. The era in which Cervantes lived is a turbulent era, so some of his ideas cannot be expressed and his ambition cannot be displayed. And Don Quixote, a seemingly absurd knight story, which contains a large number of metaphors, expresses the view of Cervantes in his time. Studying the metaphor in the book not only gives us a more thorough understanding of the conceptual metaphor, but also takes us into the complex era.

Actually, when people refer to Don Quixote, they often think of the absurd characters and plots. When analyzing and studying this book, people are used to studying its irony. And in the literature, many research efforts have been placed on the knight literature. But whether it is the ironic or the "different" knight literature which was shown in Don Quixote, its essence cannot be separated from the life experience of writer’s and the background of the times. When shaping the role of Don Quixote, Cervantes unconsciously reflects his own shadow. So, I think, from the perspective of

conceptual metaphor, combined with the background of the time and the author experience, can better understand this wonderful literary works. In the thesis, I use the theory of conceptual metaphor to analyze three aspects of the book -- the reflection of author, historical background and feudal images.

Demonstration

• 1. Theoretical Framework

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson put forward the conceptual metaphor theory in the book metaphors we live by which was published in 1980. They think that "metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff amp; Johnson 6). Conceptual metaphor is that human beings use a domain of experience to illustrate and understand another domain. People tend to use specific, familiar, simple, tangible concepts to understand and experience abstract, unfamiliar, replicative, intangible concepts.

• • 1. Development of Conceptual metaphor

In the West, Aristotle first began a systematic study of metaphor. In his works “Poetics” and “rhetoric” (Barnesamp; Noble, 2013), Aristotle expounds the methods and functions of metaphor as a rhetorical device. He defines metaphor as “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, that is, proportion” (Aristotle 339). For other attributes of metaphor, Aristotle says: “Metaphor, moreover, gives style clearness, charm, and distinction as nothing else can, and it is not a thing whose use can be taught by one man to another.” In the late 1930s to the early 1970s, Scholars began to study metaphor from the perspectives of linguistics, logic and philosophy. With the publication of Richards's Rhetoric Philosophy in 1930s, the study of metaphor broke through the limitation of lexical comparative research and had risen to the sentence level.

And Lakoff and Johnson published in 1980 the book metaphors we live by, which

has been hailed as the new path of the history of metaphor study. They propose a new concept of metaphor that metaphor is a cognitive approach. They argue that metaphors exist in our daily lives, and that there are few words without metaphorical features. They define metaphor as: through a class of things to understand and experience another kind of thing. According to this definition, metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive approach. It is a kind of cognitive activity of human beings with a field of experience to illustrate and understand another field. Philosophers and cognitive linguists have shown that metaphors “are powerful cognitive tools for our conceptualization of abstract categories” (Ungerer amp; Schrmid 114).

Traditionally, metaphors have been considered as figures of speech, which are ornamental devices used in rhetorical style. In other words, metaphor is only regarded as a semantic problem. This interpretation in semantics has been questioned. With the development of pragmatics, it proposes that metaphor should be understood on the basis of logic and context. However, the view of metaphor is still limited to the perspective of language use. With the emergence of modern cognitive theory, researchers began to analyze the phenomenon of metaphor from cognitive mechanism to other fields. The embodied cognition and conceptual metaphor theory has begun to be applied in analysis of literature works. Now, many scholars have explored the metaphors in classical literature works like Hamlet and studied how the writer expressed the protagonist's inner pain through metaphors; at the same time, there are lots of researchers studying the metaphors for the demons and ghosts in the novel Journey to the West, and exploring the reflection of social reality in the works.

• • 1. Structure of metaphor

According to Lakoff and Johnson, conceptual metaphor can be divided into ontological metaphors, structural metaphor and orientational metaphor. Ontological metaphor refers to the use of concrete objects to express an abstract thing. It is one of the most basic metaphorical types. The production of ontological metaphors is in the light of the development of human society and cognitive capacity grounding in our