Metaphor (English Grammar Series)

Author: Ren Shaozeng
:
: 2001-04-01
Features: This book is the 7th in the "Cobuild English Grammar Series" and discusses the most common metaphors in modern spoken and written English, specifically the use of words or phrases to express meanings beyond their literal sense. The book consists of 12 chapters, each focusing on a specific topic based on natural phenomena, the material world, or a certain aspect of human life. These topics include the human body, health and disease, animals, buildings, machines, games and sports, cooking and food, plants, weather, temperature, light and color, direction and movement, etc. Each chapter explores how words or phrases related to these topics are used metaphorically to convey meanings beyond their literal sense.
Building on this basic categorization, each chapter is further divided into subcategories based on the main topic of the chapter. For example, the chapter on "the human body" is divided into sections such as "head" and "face," the chapter on "animals" is divided into sections such as "domestic animals," "farming animals," and "wild animals," and the chapter on "weather" is further divided into sections such as "sunny weather," "cold weather," and "cloudy and humid weather." These sections provide detailed and specific explanations and descriptions of the metaphorical meanings and usage of words and phrases that refer to these things themselves and belong to the categories represented by these things (e.g., "eyes" and "noses" that belong to "face," "dogs" and "cats" that belong to "domestic animals," and "frost" and "snow" that belong to "cold weather," etc.).
Thus, the metaphors discussed in this book fall under 12 major categories and 55 subcategories, totaling more than 800. Additionally, the book selects more than 1,500 examples from the Cobuild corpus (The Bank of English), which contains over 300 million words, to provide practical illustrations for the discussions of metaphors in each chapter.