On Understanding and Creation of Conceptual Metaphor——Also on its Enlightement on Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

Metaphor is not only the means for language rethoric, but also a universal thinking way and cognitive approach. One concept is used to understand, construct and express another concept, this is called Conceptual Metaphor. As the cinculum of cognition and language, conceptual metaphor offers a new angle to human thinking, experience and foreign language teaching. Using metaphor in teaching vocabulary network is in accordance with the rule of cognition, is beneficial to the breaking of the bottleneck in traditional vocabulary teaching and to the training of students' metaphorical thinking and language construction. This paper explores the process of the formation and understanding of conceptual metaphor based on cognition, and the use of vocabulary network in authentic context derived from conceptual metaphor.