English Grammar Series 7 -- Metaphor

Author: (English) Dai Nan, edited by Ding Jianmin, translated by Ding Jianmin
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2001-04-04
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, which refers to the situation where words or phrases convey meanings beyond their literal sense in usage. 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 separately explores how words or phrases related to these topics are used metaphorically to express meanings beyond their literal sense. On this basic categorization, each chapter is further divided into smaller subcategories based on the main topic of the chapter, such as the chapter on "the human body" is divided into sections like "head" and "face," the chapter on "animals" is divided into sections like "domestic animals," "farm animals," and "wild animals," and the chapter on "weather" is further divided into sections like "sunny weather," "cold weather," and "cloudy and humid 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.). In this way, the metaphors discussed in this book belong to 12 major categories and 55 subcategories, totaling over 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 evidence for the discussion of metaphors in each chapter.