Metaphor

Author: Dai Nan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-04-01
Features: This book is the 7th volume in the "Cobuild English Grammar Series" and discusses the most commonly used metaphors in modern spoken and written English, specifically the situations where words or phrases convey meanings beyond their literal sense. The book consists of 12 chapters, each based on a natural phenomenon, the material world, or a specific aspect of human life, covering 12 topics such as the human body, health and disease, animals, buildings, machines, games and sports, cooking and food, plants, weather, temperature, light and color, and direction and movement. Each chapter explores the metaphorical use of words or phrases related to these topics, expressing meanings beyond their literal sense.
Building on this basic categorization, each chapter is further divided into smaller subcategories based on the main topic of the chapter. For example, the chapter on "the human body" is divided into subcategories like "head" and "face," the chapter on "animals" is divided into "domestic animals," "farm animals," and "wild animals," and the chapter on "weather" is further divided into "sunny weather," "cold weather," and "cloudy and damp weather." The book provides detailed and specific explanations and descriptions of the metaphorical meanings and usage of words and phrases that refer to these things themselves and those subordinate to the categories they represent (e.g., "eyes" and "noses" subordinate to "face," "dogs" and "cats" subordinate to "domestic animals," and "frost" and "snow" subordinate to "cold weather," etc.).
As a result, the metaphors discussed in this book fall under 12 major categories and 55 subcategories, totaling more than 800. Additionally, the book selects 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.