The conceptual nature of metaphor suggests that the mechanism of metaphor is much related to human cognition and ultimately the kind of culture that a language represents.
To cognitive linguists, language is not just a system, consisting of arbitrary signs, and its structures are related to and motivated by human conceptual knowledge. Language is inseparable from conceptual thought, while conceptual thought is inseparable from human experience. Human cognition plays a very important role in the structuring of language. Usually, language is congruent with reality. So nouns are used to realize entities, verbs are used to realize
processes, and adverbs or prepositional phrases are used to realize the circumstantial elements. In language people are supposed to do, to speak, to think, to feel, to behave as people really do in reality. Entities are supposed to be or to exist as they do in the material world. But language does not act in this easy way. Instead, it may work more complicatedly. Entities can do things as people do, people can do many things as entities do. Even nonentities can do like entities.
There are two reasons for the above phenomenon, both concerning cognition of the human mind. One is that the human mind limits their knowledge about the outside and the inside world. People sometimes do not know how to express their experience about the world. They have to rely on the knowledge they already have. They have to model what they do not know on what they know. That is the designatory function of metaphor. This designatory metaphor
involves giving names to new or nameless things or giving an expression to a new phenomenon. It applies to both lexicon and grammar. The application in lexicon can be exemplified in word formation and lexical semantic extension.
More examples are the American toponyms that are named after places in the Old World such as New York, New Jersey, New Haven. It is clear that these names are in fact brought into being by modeling upon old ones and so are the products of designatory metaphors. A similar case is that in many languages the names of sea animals are only those of the land animals slightly elaborated (preceded by sea or 海to indicate the classification),as sea lion,sea snake, sea horse in English and海豹,海狮,海狗,海马in Chinese.“Here,it is obvious that human beings take advantage of ready-made signs for land animals and designate the sea animals accordingly".
The application of designatory metaphor in grammar can be exemplified in metaphorical expressions of abstract concepts, such as emotion and time. The emotion of anger is usually expressed in terms of heat or internal pressure while the emotion of happiness is often expressed in the metaphors of orientation and light. Therefore, in Chinese anger is described as 生气(produce gas) while happiness is described as 高兴(high-spirit). Similarly, notions of time are expressed in terms of space, thus saying long time, remote time,short time in English and 时间长,时间短in Chinese.
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