浅析概念隐喻角度下的英语词汇教学

论文总字数：33018字

摘 要

本文从隐喻学角度出发，针对英语教学中的词汇教学做了简要研究。详细介绍了隐喻概念及其分类、功能、产生原因。本文另一方面分析了英语词汇教学的现状，提出了将隐喻运用于英语词汇教学的重要性。更重要的是介绍了词汇教学中隐喻的应用。为取得更好的词汇教学效果，本研究启示教师们在词汇教学中，向学生们介绍隐喻思维模式，引导学生了解隐喻的文化特征，并发展学生的隐喻意识与隐喻能力。真正重要的并不是学生们接受的词汇短语的数量，而是学生们如何理解词汇，掌握了何种技能以及如何运用技能。

关键词：隐喻概念；词汇教学现状；应用

Contents

1. Introduction……………………………………………………….………1
2. Literature Review……………………………………………….…………1

2.1 The definition of metaphor...................……………………………………...2

2.2 The significance of English vocabulary teaching............................................3

1. Metaphorical Concepts..................................................................................3

3.1 Metaphorical concepts and its classifications..................................................4

3.2 Metaphorical concepts and its functions.........................................................5

3.3 Metaphorical concepts and its formation reasons...........................................6

1. The Application of Metaphor to English Vocabulary Teaching.................7

4.1 The current situation of English vocabulary teaching.....................................7

4.2 The ways metaphor is brought into vocabulary teaching................................8

4.2.1 To introduce metaphorical thinking mode to students..................................9

4.2.2 To guide students to know cultural features of each metaphor implied.....10

4.2.3 To cultivate metaphorical awareness and metaphorical competence.........11

5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………....…..12

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………...13

1. Introduction

The main content of English learning is vocabulary learning, in this way, it is thought that the entire English teaching relies on how to adopt vocabulary teaching. Meanwhile, Li strongly believes that “All language is metaphorical.”(Li 35). It is supposed to be noticed that metaphor should be introduced in order to teach vocabulary in a better way. Allegory, metonymy, simile, personification and so on can be adopted to the language learners to make them have a clear comprehension of English vocabulary in different contexts. When vocabulary is taught, the improvement of metaphoric awareness and the cultivation of metaphoric competence should be valued.

Metaphorical concepts, which reveal the deep meaning of the vocabulary, avoid students from grasping the surface meaning passively only. Meanwhile, with metaphorical thinking mode, students will be able to draw inferences about other cases from one instance, which will benefit them when they come across some unfamiliar words in reading or translation. By inhabiting students’ metaphorical awareness, students may become interested in finding out each metaphor’s cultural characteristics and understand each metaphorical concept in a better way. Once students get familiar with the classification and function of the metaphorical concepts after teachers insert metaphorical concepts into English vocabulary teaching, the whole English teaching and students’ vocabulary acquisition even English acquisition, will become much easier.

In conclusion, this research could make some contributions to the future education of English vocabulary teaching and students’ English acquisition.

1. Literature Review

In the general case, vocabulary teaching mainly includes morphology, lexical meaning, pronunciation and its usage. In the opinion of associationism, the isolated word itself has no meaning, and the sense of isolated words derives from the context and realizes its value in the context. Therefore, vocabulary teaching should put the target words in the language environment to learn and discuss (Xiao 78). A word can transform from the literal interpretation to the figurative meaning in different language environment, at the same time, the semantic shift appears, in which is a difficult aspect for learners to grasp the usage of vocabulary. Due to typical features of metaphor, it is becoming one of the most common ways of semantic shift. In addition, from the perspective of pragmatics, metaphor is another understanding chosen from the conflicts between the literal meaning of the words and the language environment, which is corresponding with the latter one (Dai 17). Shu once said that metaphor is an important way of the change of denotation in language, and it is the precursor of the language variety and the cutting edge of language. Metaphor keeps transforming and the convention follows it closely. Then as the time going by, metaphor becomes dead metaphor and a part of the semantics. Metaphoric words therefore become homonym, polysemy and so on (Shu 119). In this way we can see that metaphor is the necessary part if one wants to learn vocabulary well. Li greatly held the opinion that “All language is metaphorical” (Li 35), which should be noticed that metaphor should be introduced so as to teach vocabulary in a better way. As the author has mentioned, allegory, metonymy, simile, personification and so on can be adopted to the language learners to make them have a clear understanding of English vocabulary in different contexts.

2.1 The definition of metaphor

The word “metaphor” in English, which comes from “metaphora” in Latin, combined by “meta”,which means “over”, and “pherein”, which means “carry”, that is “carry over”. Aristotle has pointed out that metaphor is the application to one thing of name belonging to anther and the most important thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. The argument that metaphor is the mark of genius has appeared in his work Poetics 2000 years ago. From the perspective of Aristotle, metaphor is, firstly, from the genus to the species; secondly, from the species to the genus; thirdly, from one species to another; and the last one, a matter of analogy. (Dai 11) In brief, metaphor borrows the words on behalf of other things as metaphor.

As one can see from above, metaphor is an imaginative way to describe something by the way of referring to some other things which has no difference in a particular way. For instance, if you want to state that somebody is very shy and afraid of something, you might express your thought like this: He/She is a mouse. It is a figure of speech where an expression is applied to show something that does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity.

Metaphor, or the ways by which one thing is stated in terms of the other, which has been described as a central tool of our cognitive apparatus, is very central to our understanding of how thought, discourse and even language are built. With the time going by, the study of metaphor has been of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplines, in which linguistics, psychology, philosophy and literature are included.

Metaphor in one form or another is extremely important to the way language systems develop over time and are structured, and to the way human beings consolidate and extend their ideas about themselves, relationships as well as their knowledge of the world around them. Consequently, metaphor becomes necessary to poets, literary commentators, philosophers, scientists, sociologists, psychologists, historical linguists and even syntacticians. Moreover, it is of absolute importance to English vocabulary teaching.

2.2 The significance of English vocabulary teaching

As Harmer (Xiao 67) has pointed, if grammatical structure is the skeleton of the language, the vocabulary is the organs and blood and fresh of it. Though grammatical structure is mastered, no meaning could be conveyed if the vocabulary has not been used. Gass (Xiao 67) also supported that vocabulary played a vital role in second language learning or foreign language learning. Learning a foreign language means learning the words of this language. Besides, it is insisted that generalized vocabulary teaching is the whole English teaching. To be specific, teaching vocabulary equals with teaching culture, communication, thought, study and language. This five equations represent the main idea of vocabulary teaching in English teaching field in China at present. (Xiao 69) Without vocabulary, students would understand no meaning of a passage, write no good of an essay, and the fundamental thing, grasp no essence of English. To learn a language, first of all, is to learn its vocabulary.

3. Metaphorical Concepts

It is necessary for foreign language learners to understand metaphorical concepts. Without them, we could understand very little beyond our physical experiences. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. (Lakeoff and Johnson 5) They hold the viewpoint that metaphor is not merely a matter of words. Over the left, human thought processes are greatly metaphorical. And it means human conceptual system is metaphorically constructed and defined. Since metaphors exist in a person’s conceptual system, metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible. Therefore, all the metaphors we live by can be recognized as metaphorical concept.

The case of “TIME IS MONEY” can be shown as a metaphorical concept.

She is wasting my time.

How did your parents spend their anniversary last year?

That poor boy has invested plenty of time in his girlfriend.

I lost lots of time when I was in hospital.

We don’t have enough time to spare for that.

As one can see, time in the culture is a ponderable merchandise, a limited source that we use to get our goals done. Among the expressions listed, some refer to money (spend, invest), others refer specifically to limited resources (have enough, waste), and some others to precious commodities (lose). All of these are metaphorical concepts.

3.1 Metaphorical concepts and its classifications

In terms of the function, effect and cognitive features of metaphor, it can be divided into explicit metaphor and implicit/opaque metaphor, radical/root metaphor and derivative metaphor. The so-called explicit metaphor is what people usually know simile. The root metaphor is regarded as a central concept, from which the metaphors derive are called derivative metaphor. (Dai 4) Numbers of root metaphors affect human beings’ formation of conceptual systems, cognitive ways and so on greatly, and this kind of metaphors are called as conceptual metaphors by Lakoffamp;Johnson. (Lakoff and Johnson 14).

Then conceptual metaphor, or metaphorical concepts, as a fundamental concept in the field of study of metaphor, can be seen as three kinds (Lakoff and Johnson 14-25), that are structural metaphors, in which one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another; orientational metaphors, cases where one does not structure one concept in terms of another but instead organizes a whole system of concepts with respect to one another and ontological metaphors, also known as entityamp;substance metaphors, serve various purposes and the various kinds of metaphors reflecting the kinds of purposes served. The thing we should not ignore is that among ontological metaphors where people regard the abstract and obscure thought, feeling, event and concept as the specific and tangible entity, container metaphor, who sees everything with container, is the most typical and the most representative one.

Metaphorical concepts play quite a momentous role in the area of thought, behavior and pictorical representation. In fact, teachers can make full use of theories of conceptual metaphor, which is seen as a kind of teaching device, to help students understand and grasp the use of many distinct vocabulary that is difficult to distinguish or store in the long memory.

3.2 Metaphorical concepts and its functions

Metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language. T.Carlyle (Shu 106) supports that language is the clothes of thought and metaphor is the raw material of language.

The function makes it indispensable in English vocabulary teaching. First of all, metaphor can fill up the empty of vocabulary. Hester (Shu 117) thinks that metaphor can be seen in every word if its etymology is researched. However, the dead metaphor like mountainside makes people ignore the metaphor in daily life. Besides, by metaphor, people are able to discuss the new, unknown objects with the old, known words and express the subtle difference between things to reflect its characteristics and nature more vivid, which all provides possibilities for polysemy.

Secondly, metaphor can make expression accurate and figurative. The objective world complicated and the inner world abundant, any vocabulary of any language is quite deficient. To communicate efficiently, it is needed to borrow the other types of vocabulary to state the same or similar meaning. For example, there are not many words to express one’s hearing, but the metaphorical language such as “a warm, richly textured organ chord” can be used to achieve a better goal. (Dai 14) Moreover, when the words fail to express some concepts or phenomena accurate, using special ways to replace the words can make it better. Take the sentence that He put his face in the water and half-gulp and half-ate it. (Dai 15) for example, the words “half-gulp” and “half-ate” reappear the scene of what he is doing and his inner world fully.

Thirdly, metaphor can give abstract concepts an idiographic feature and show a complex idea in a simple but concise and comprehensive way. The general linguistic form would usually make the mixed thought more complicated and more difficult to understand, will only achieve the opposite to what one wishes, but with metaphor, it would be easier to make it. Reading is not so easy to describe, but with metaphor, it is represented as “Books are food.” Becon (Dai 40) has used many words describing food to describe reading books in Of Studies, among which the most famous one is that “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” The sentence illustrates three ways to read books and it is simple for readers to grasp Bacon’s thought with the metaphors used. There are many other patterns such as “The tale comes to a tasteless end.”, “Alice does so much reading that she cannot assimilate it at all.” and “After a careful taste, I finally saw the special style of the book.”

Apart from the functions above, it is undeniable that there exist other functions. Beck (Liu 60-63) has pointed out that metaphorical inferential capability is one basic ability independent from intelligence and not valued by educational workers. The author strongly believes that such metaphorical inferential ability should be and must be attached great importance to, for this ability associating various fields to infer is the main capability to analogize context to find out the similarity in vocabulary and grasp the essence of metaphor and promote vocabulary teaching.

3.3 Metaphorical concepts and its formation reasons

Vocabulary in any language seems so minute when facing the mixed outer world and rich inner world of human beings. The dominating function of metaphor is expanding meaning and creating meaning, with metaphor padding empty, conveying accurately and figuratively and simplifying complexity.

Although there are numerous standard vocabulary, it is impossible to include all the scene and action throughout the outer world and the inner one, then when there is no suitable word in current lexicon to present a new concept or a particular one, borrowing an existing expression is imperative, which resulting in plenty of metaphorical vocabulary. A new natural or cultural phenomenon needing to be named, some believe requiring a key word to remember such as “American dream” and some social ideality wanting symbolic significance to state such as “the melting pot” (Dai 16), all these causes lead to the appearance of metaphor.

1. The Application of Metaphor to English Vocabulary Teaching

To learn is to use. Grasping the essence is the key to teaching English vocabulary in a better way, and putting metaphor into real use is a truly matter.

4.1 The current situation of English vocabulary teaching

It cannot be denied that nowadays, traditional vocabulary teaching plays a leading role in vocabulary teaching. Teachers usually teach vocabulary by listing some typical examples, represent the affix or teaching through reading, which only make students receive the knowledge passively. Furthermore, some teachers even adopt to relate the English vocabulary to Chinese characters with the same sounds, which totally confuses students and has no benefit to them. It is well-known that a lot of words in English are produced by the influence of cultural factors and metaphorical concept. It is clearly and absolutely not a good method to teach English from the ways listed above. There are many and many words for students to remember and master then to use. As a teacher, what one should do is to teach students to be an independent learner, to grasp the gist to learn vocabulary and to draw inferences about other cases from one instance. To make it, applying metaphor to English vocabulary teaching is the key point.

The view is held that metaphor is “a cross-do-main mapping in the conceptual system”. It is in essence “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another”. That’s why one could say that metaphor is quite significant resource for the production of vocabulary, semantic expansion and language use. Also it has been pointed out that there are 70 percent of expressions in daily language originating from metaphor, which obviously makes more and more people become conscious of the role in directing language teaching----it is a breath of life, the water to fish.

As the combination of cognition and language, metaphor always enjoys a crucial position during the process of vocabulary acquisition and also, vocabulary teaching, which means, in the process of language development, new meaning is endowed to the old words according to metaphorical concept. Once students master the metaphoric mode and then have a perfect command of it, they can simplify the acquisition process of vocabulary without a hitch and know the skills of enlarging vocabulary with a wet finger. The most important thing is that the vocabulary teaching under the guide of metaphorical concepts can overcome the limits of traditional vocabulary teaching, lead students to a lasting and profitable method of learning vocabulary, even other aspects of English acquisition.

4.2 The ways metaphor is brought into vocabulary teaching

It is well known that the purpose of vocabulary teaching in English is to enlarge the depth and breadth of vocabulary. English is not only rich in vocabulary but every single word has several meanings. As a matter of fact, many words are produced in metaphorical ways. It is possible that different language has different ways to construct vocabulary, but the rules following are common in much language (Dai 17): the extension of meaning, the transfer of meaning and the conversion of words. “Pupil” means “a student” and “crane” means “lifting machine” which all illustrate the first rule. The word “head” originally refers to an organ in human or animal’s body, but in computer English, the word “head” means magnetic read in disc, which obviously becomes a technical word. Apparently the reference words of these two meanings are similar in the position and function, thus, based on the similarity, the word “head” transfers to become a metaphorical concept. The noun “dog” converts to the verb “to behave like a dog” and the noun “mouse” to the verb “to behave like a mouse” all revert the transformation of words.

In terms of lexical semantics, semantic shift happens when a word transfer from its external meaning to the metaphorical one, which is a significant way to produce words. While teaching vocabulary, the primary meaning should be paid much attention to, but inspiring students to discover its internal significance and the metaphorical concepts are of the same importance. There are other rules the teacher should obey when teaching vocabulary.

4.2.1 To introduce metaphorical thinking mode to students

As an old saying in China goes, “It is better to offer the method of fishing rather than the fish itself”. Teachers should cultivate students’ thinking modes in which they memorize vocabulary with metaphor rather than teach more words in the limited time of class.

Teachers can help students distinguish the difference between ‘friendship’ and ‘love’ in native language. For example, love is more profound than friendship (spatial metaphor); love is based on like, friendship is based on trust (architectural metaphor); love is emotional with heart, friendship is rational with head (metaphor of the body part). These examples make them realize metaphor is everywhere.

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