A sutdy of Metaphor in Hakka Proverbs: A Case of Love and Marriage

• Main Authors: Chiu, Chi-Hsiu, 邱琦琇
• Other Authors: 范瑞玲
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/09914967750313968163

碩士 === 國立聯合大學 === 客家語言與傳播研究所 === 101 === This thesis aims to investigate the concepts of love and marriage in Hakka proverbs by studying the metaphor. “Meahpor” is one kind of rhetorical metaphor; it substitutes other words for the word metaphor in the simile in narratives. In the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics, metaphor is a way of thinking that uses an experi-ence domain to understand and construct another completely different experience domain. Therefore “Conceptual Metaphor” was theorized on the basis of metaphors. Fauconnier and Turner then proposed Blending Theory in 2002 to explain the com-mon features and generations of new semantic structure in different spaces, which complemented the lack of accurate explanation of mapping in Conceptual Metaphor. The researcher first summarized the metaphor skills and gathered Hakka proverbs related to love and marriage from corpus. The metaphor of rhetoric and two theories, Conceptual Metaphor and Blending Theory, were then adopted to analyze these Hakka proverbs. The purpose is to preliminarily understand the love and marriage metaphor skills, and the cognitive concepts expressed in love and marriage in Hakka proverbs. The results reveal that metaphors in Hakka proverbs add interesting flavor and literature essence to Hakka, which belongs to the expressions of surface meaning of a language. On the other hand, the systematic concept, expressing the deeper meaning of a language, derived from Conceptual Metaphor helps us understand the unique thinking and cognition of Hakka people. These two aspects are practically complementary. Moreover, in Hakka proverbs, animals, plants and things are mostly used as metaphors in love and marriage life, and systematic structural metaphor in the proverbs is therefore induced. For instance, a conceptual metaphor such as “A woman is a flower” could construct the following systematic structural metaphors “Marrying someone is just like picking flowers”, “A wife is a flower grown at home”, and “Marriage is flowering”. Also through the gradual analysis of Blending theory, it helps us to clearly understand the deeper meaning of Hakka proverbs and thinking processes and cognition of Hakka people.