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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study
As an extremely common linguistic phenomenon, metaphor is closely related to humancognition and thinking. In recent decades, metaphor study involves many fields, such aslinguistics, psychology, philosophy, literature etc. Since the publication of Metaphors We LiveBy by Lakoff & Johnson in 1980，the study of metaphor from the perspective of cognitivelinguistics has been drawing increasing attention. Linguists Littlemore and Low have pointedout that the latest development of cognitive linguistics highlights the importance of metaphorin language and the ubiquitousness of metaphor. But in second language learning，languagelearners' competence to use metaphor often has not been considered as a core ability and hasnot been given enough attention in the foreign language teaching. Metaphor scientistGibbs(1997) once said that metaphor is undoubtedly one of the most complex problem in theinterwoven fields of language and thinking, however，the rewards obtained from the study andusing of metaphor are abundant. In 1999, the British scholar Cameron&Low publishedResearching and Applying Metaphor, which marks the metaphor research has entered theapplication stage.In China，the study of metaphor generally began from 1990s and mainly focused on thefield of cognitive linguistics, including pragmatics, semantics and the basic workingmechanism and understanding process of metaphor. Besides, the study of grammatical1metaphor is also involved. In 2002, the first National Conference on Cognitive Linguisticspromotes the study of metaphor in Applied Linguistics in China. Ever since then，thediscussion about the relations between the metaphor and foreign language teaching has beenput on the agenda.
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1.2 Significance and Purpose of the Study
Numerous studies demonstrate that the bottleneck for the development of secondlanguage learners' linguistic competence is conceptual rather than grammatical. Because thesecond language learners are in short of basic knowledge of the conceptual system of thetarget language, they often take it for granted to map the native language conceptualizationprocess to the target language forms and usually apply the conceptual system of nativelanguage to the expressions of the second language. Therefore, it can cause a high degree ofliteralness in the expressions of the target language. Even worse, it can lead to some rigid,boring, unacceptable errors in statements. Even if the second language learners use someconceptual metaphors in the verbal output, they usually copy them from the mother tongueand do not conduct conceptual reorganization. Of course, they can not feel, understand andrepresent the world like the native speakers of the target language at last.Based on the theories of conceptual metaphor and the in-depth analysis of the metaphor working mechanism, this study applies these into vocabulary, culture, writing teachingpractice. On one hand, it can enable students to understand the process of vocabularydevelopment and evolution. It also can help explain the inherent rules and connections amongthe different meanings of the same word and cultivate students’ ability to infer other thingsfrom one fact, so as to improve the efficiency of vocabulary learning. On the other hand, itcan enable students to understand the cultural similarities and dif本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。