In conclusion, this research could make some contributions to the future education of English vocabulary teaching and students’ English acquisition。

2。 Literature Review

     In the general case, vocabulary teaching mainly includes morphology, lexical meaning, pronunciation and its usage。 In the opinion of associationism, the isolated word itself has no meaning, and the sense of isolated words derives from the context and realizes its value in the context。 Therefore, vocabulary teaching should put the target words in the language environment to learn and discuss (Xiao 78)。 A word can transform from the literal interpretation to the figurative meaning in different language environment, at the same time, the semantic shift appears, in which is a difficult aspect for learners to grasp the usage of vocabulary。 Due to typical features of metaphor, it is becoming one of the most common ways of semantic shift。 In addition, from the perspective of pragmatics, metaphor is another understanding chosen from the conflicts between the literal meaning of the words and the language environment, which is corresponding with the latter one (Dai 17)。 Shu once said that metaphor is an important way of the change of denotation in language, and it is the precursor of the language variety and the cutting edge of language。 Metaphor keeps transforming and the convention follows it closely。 Then as the time going by, metaphor becomes dead metaphor and a part of the semantics。 Metaphoric words therefore become homonym, polysemy and so on (Shu 119)。 In this way we can see that metaphor is the necessary part if one wants to learn vocabulary well。 Li greatly held the opinion that “All language is metaphorical” (Li 35), which should be noticed that metaphor should be introduced so as to teach vocabulary in a better way。 As the author has mentioned, allegory, metonymy, simile, personification and so on can be adopted to the language learners to make them have a clear understanding of English vocabulary in different contexts。 

2。1 The definition of metaphor论文网

The word “metaphor” in English, which comes from “metaphora” in Latin, combined by “meta”,which means “over”, and “pherein”, which means “carry”, that is “carry over”。 Aristotle has pointed out that metaphor is the application to one thing of name belonging to anther and the most important thing by far is to be a master of metaphor。 The argument that metaphor is the mark of genius has appeared in his work Poetics 2000 years ago。 From the perspective of Aristotle, metaphor is, firstly, from the genus to the species; secondly, from the species to the genus; thirdly, from one species to another; and the last one, a matter of analogy。 (Dai 11) In brief, metaphor borrows the words on behalf of other things as metaphor。

As one can see from above, metaphor is an imaginative way to describe something by the way of referring to some other things which has no difference in a particular way。 For instance, if you want to state that somebody is very shy and afraid of something, you might express your thought like this: He/She is a mouse。 It is a figure of speech where an expression is applied to show something that does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity。

Metaphor, or the ways by which one thing is stated in terms of the other, which has been described as a central tool of our cognitive apparatus, is very central to our understanding of how thought, discourse and even language are built。 With the time going by, the study of metaphor has been of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplines, in which linguistics, psychology, philosophy and literature are included。

Metaphor in one form or another is extremely important to the way language systems develop over time and are structured, and to the way human beings consolidate and extend their ideas about themselves, relationships as well as their knowledge of the world around them。 Consequently, metaphor becomes necessary to poets, literary commentators, philosophers, scientists, sociologists, psychologists, historical linguists and even syntacticians。 Moreover, it is of absolute importance to English vocabulary teaching。