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The Study of Metaphor in the Bible: A Cognitive Approach

Author: XuChunYing
Tutor: MaBoSen
School: Zhejiang University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: metaphor Metaphor understanding theories meaning teaching perspective have word context
CLC: H05
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2004
Downloads: 279
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Abstract

Metaphor has appealed to the concern of scholars since ancient times. Philosophers, linguists and psychologists nowadays have carried on metaphor research by studying it from a cognitive perspective through interdisciplinary collaboration. Under the influence of "metaphormania" in the Western countries, many Chinese scholars also show interest in the study of metaphor. One of the focuses is to study metaphor in a particular culture. In this approach, the research is conducted through collecting metaphor-related cultural background knowledge and trying to illustrate the origin, mechanism and operation of metaphor in that culture. The purpose is to try to make the illusive principles of metaphor clearer.Considering the fact that the Bible, as a religious text, can provide abundant examples of metaphorical expressions, and there is a growing concern over studies combining metaphor with religion, this paper attempts to explain the role metaphor plays in the Hebrew culture. In this paper, four metaphor theories are chosen in order to provide the theoretical framework: Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, Dedre Gentner’s structure-mapping theory, Andrew Ortony’s salience imbalance theory and Richard and Black’s Interaction View.Lakoff and Johnson understand the nature of metaphor as "the mam mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning". They analyze the structure of metaphor in terms of "mappings across conceptual domains", and they claim that such mappings are "not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in everyday experience and knowledge." Gentner’s systematiciry principle bears many similarities with Lakoff’s contemporary theory. According to his theory, the core of metaphor is the mapping of relationships. Central to the mapping process is the principle of systematicity. The paper chooses the key Biblical metaphor-the PASTORAL metaphor for illustration of the two theories. The entities systematically corresponding to each other in both source and target domains of this metaphor are explored and mappings are established in order to explicitly recognize how the sourceof Biblical metaphors resides in pervasive patterns of bodily experience in the shepherding life.The "Salience Imbalance" perspective on metaphor by Ortony recognizes that metaphors arise due to a desire, on the part of the speaker, to highlight less salient properties of the tenor, by forcing a comparison with a vehicle concept in which those very properties are considered highly salient. Ortony’s salience imbalance theory comprises only one part of the metaphor story. However, it facilitates our understanding of how the Hebrew shaped, substantiated and settled their religious conception of "God" by choosing then: major lifestyle, the shepherding life, as a vehicle and comparing its salient properties (shepherd, sheep, goats, grass, water, pasture, rod, staff, beasts, etc.) to the love, care, provision and protection of God.Richard and Black’s Interaction View claims that metaphor is a cognitively irreducible phenomenon that works not at the level of word combination, but much deeper, arising out of the interactions between the conceptual structures underlying words. The paper goes further in digging out the relationships between metaphor and culture by exploring the metaphorical nature of the Hebrew thought and language at the level of conception, and proves that metaphor is very fundamentally at work in thought, language, and culture, or a particular part of culture-religion.The paper also studies the relationships between metaphor and wisdom by analyzing King Solomon’s metaphors in the Biblical book of "Proverbs", and proves that the wisdom obtained from describing the abstract domains in terms of concrete domains is by nature a kind of metaphorical scheme of thought.As metaphor is so essential in cognitive activities of the world and plays a significant role in the development of human proper moral and intellectual judgment, the paper concludes by making some suggestions

The Study of Metaphor in the Bible: A Cognitive Approach

Abstract

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