4.3 Suggestions for Future Study    21
Acknowledgements    22
Bibliography    23Part Ⅰ Introduction
Metaphor has enchanted many scholars both at home and abroad with its special fascination for a long time. Researches on it has undergone several significant turns through different phases, from the initial rhetoric, then the semantics, to the recent cognitive domain. Traditionally it was regarded only as a kind of rhetoric technique, and studies on it were mostly confined to literary or rhetorical level. With the development of Western linguistics, researches on metaphor enters into a multidisciplinary phase and the conceptual metaphor presented by Lakoff and Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By brings an impact and a challenge to the traditional theory. They pointed out that people perceive their experience and knowledge of the outside world mostly in a metaphorical way. Thus, metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon but also a way of thinking that affects people’s thoughts and actions. Then we may guess that discourse, whether a written discourse or a spoken one which is derived from people’s is metaphorical. And the metaphorical way helps people communicate and better understand each other. But how on earth conceptual metaphor acts in spoken discourse and reaches to its end? In this thesis, based on Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, we will explore how conceptual metaphor acts in the spoken discourse like samples selected from American TV show Revenge, attempting to find out how the metaphorical expressions constructing cognitive framework to better understand the dialogues and their implied meanings.

1.1 The Significance of the Research
Nowadays, the study of conceptual metaphor has become a hot spot in the research area, but most of the studies on conceptual metaphor focus on analyses of literature and scientific text or on text translation. Spoken discourse has been ignored by many scholars, which is a defect in the study of conceptual metaphor. What’s more, all-sided studies are needed to contribute to an integrate theory of conceptual metaphor, thus researches from a new angle, namely on a spoken discourse level, may bring us new discovery. On the other hand, we all know that in everyday life speaking is the most unique and common way by which people express thoughts and convey emotions; the abundant language material from our daily life lay a solid foundation for the progress of the study. So it is practical and significant to explore how conceptual metaphor acts in people’s everyday thoughts and actions, and how it enables people to better understand each other and to reach the goal of communication finally. In short, it is feasible and necessary to conduct the study from the perspective of spoken discourse.

1.2 The Structure of the Thesis
This paper contains four parts. Part 1 is an introduction of the whole essay, including theoretical bases, objective and structure of the thesis. Part 2 is a literature review. It firstly gives a traditional definition to metaphor, and then goes to the cognitive linguistics. And then illuminations of the definition, classification and function of the conceptual metaphor are conducted. It points out the cohesive and coherent function of conceptual metaphor in discourse with emphasis on the function part. Part 3 unfolds the concrete analysis of the spoken discourse, American TV show Revenge, in a way of conceptual metaphor. It shows the way conceptual metaphor acts in spoken discourse, and tells the interrelationship between discourse and conceptual metaphor. Part 4 comes to the conclusion of the previous part of the paper and then points out some limitations of this thesis, followed by advices for the future study.

Part Ⅱ Conceptual Metaphor
Metaphor study can be dated back to the western Greco-Roman period. And Aristotle is the first great ideologist who studied metaphor systematically in Poetics and Rhetoric. He gave a definition to metaphor, which refers to "metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to species; or on grounds of analogy" (Aristotle 1954: 63), which did not confront any serious challenges until the 20th century. In 1930s, the interaction theory proposed by Richards in his book The Philosophy of Rhetoric ushered in a new era of metaphor study. With the development of cognitive linguistics in the West, Lakoff and Johnson made a breaking-through by publishing their book Metaphors We Live By. They brought about a cognitive approach to the study of metaphor, arguing that people perceive their experience and the outside world mostly in a metaphorical way. Since then, metaphor is not only taken as a term of language, but a kind of thought and action of people. Thus, study on metaphor has gone through 3 stages and Black (1954) first classified the main theories on metaphor study as the comparison theory, the substitution theory and the interaction theory. 美剧《复仇》的语篇分析(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_9177.html