Metaphorical Representation of the Concept ‘Weather’ in the English Language

George Layoff and Mark Johnson's book Metaphor we live by, first published in 1980, is not only credited with establishing a new approach to the study of metaphor, but also brings the "'metaphor storm'' in the linguistic world, and there have been a large number of researches. Metaphor has been regarded as an important cognitive tool, which plays a great role on people's thought, action, and language. It is known to all that vocabulary is the mirror of social development. In the fast development of our world, the lexical meaning is extended at the same time to satisfy people's growing demands. The result of the extension of lexical meaning leads to polysemous phenomenon. As a significant and pervasive semantic phenomenon across languages, polysemy has attracted much attention of linguists to do a lot of researches. Polysemous phenomenon refers to the phenomenon that one word has different related meanings. The study of polosemy is a great challenge for the other theories of semantics. However, when many people study the relationship of different meanings of a polysemous word, they are confined to the internal structure of language without taking account of the underlying working mechanism, which leads to insufficient explanation of this phenomenon. With the emergence of cognitive linguistics, metaphor provides us a powerful instrument to analyze this phenomenon better, and thereby to explicate the metaphorical influence on the extension of the lexical meaning fully and completely. Traditional studies about lexical meaning extension only focus on some superficial factors such as culture, society, history and the like. According to the mechanism from the prototype and other cognitive tools such as metaphor, cognitive linguists believe that the extension of lexical meaning is not arbitrary. The essence of metaphor is the basis of the extension of the lexical meaning, and it is certain that metaphorical thinking is closely related to extending the lexical meaning. In recent years, people study metaphor from a different perspective of our daily life, but the studies about metaphor and lexical meaning still remain few. Especially, the studies about lexical meaning extension of weather terms are fewer.