earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to examine aspects of the metaphorical meaning of the noun-noun compounds. Accordingly, what I have discussed in this paper is as follows. Firstly, it has been shown that conceptual metaphor can show up in noun-noun compounds in a variety of ways: on the modifying constituent, on the profile determinant, on both constituents of the compound, and on the relation between the two constituents of the compound. Second, the variety and complexity of cognitive meaning of the noun-noun compounds has been explored through conceptual metaphor theory and blend theory. The mainstay of conceptual metaphor theory is the conceptualization through mapping between the source domain and the target domain, but the process of the mapping has a fatal flaw. The blend theory has solved the defect of metaphor theory through its multi-space. The blend theory is a theory of the meaning construction which crucially involves partitioning the representation of sentence meaning into domains or spaces. Metaphoric mapping is also one manifestation of a more general mapping process which crucially involves the construction of blended space. This new and competing model has been called the ‘many-space’ model. In the course of comparison between the conceptual metaphor theory and blend theory in the explanatory adequacy, I have provided the evidence for the competitive role of the blend theory in interpreting the meaning of the metaphoric noun-noun compounds.