A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Moral Metaphor Systems From The Perspective Of Complex Adaptive System Theory

Morality is a crucial important ideology of human society and an indispensable rule of behavior in the evolution of human civilization.Because of its close relationship with the economy,politics,technology,religion,culture,and other factors in human society,morality builds its inherent complexity and remains an eternal topic of philosophical studies.The moral metaphor is one of the first sets of significant metaphors proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,the founders of the Cognitive Metaphor theory.However,most of the previous studies approach this subject largely from a cognitive or cultural perspective,leading to a relatively weak research interface and a tenuous connection with the intrinsic complexity of moral metaphors,not to mention the elucidation of the holistic systematicity represented by the metaphorical words.The research on moral metaphor systems is in urgent need of scientific methodology.Complex Adaptive System Theory in the frontier of modern science,with a theoretical lens on how the complexity of macro-systems emerges from micro-agents as a result of their self-organization and environmental adaptation.Given this,it is suitable for the study of the moral metaphor systems swarmed with words and influenced by multiple factors.This study attempts to apply the Complex Adaptive System theory,a new theoretical perspective,to investigate the complexity of the moral metaphor systems.This study targets the following four questions:(1)What are the conventional metaphor lexical elements in English and Chinese moral metaphor systems?(2)What are the similarities and differences between the ontological structures of English and Chinese moral metaphor systems?(3)What phase transitions do the English and Chinese systems experience on the macro-scale?(4)What are the emergence models of English and Chinese moral metaphor systems on the micro-scale?This research is a combination of qualitative study with quantitative study,synchronic study with diachronic study,and micro study with macro study.The research carries out an in-depth and detailed contrastive analysis of the issue that have been raised above,based on the self-built“English and Chinese moral metaphor words corpus”,and by using the method of corpus linguistics,natural language processing,comparative etymology,and complex system science.And the major findings of the research are as follows:Firstly,by observing the self-built corpus,the study reveals that the number of conventional metaphor words in the Chinese moral metaphor system is bigger than the number in the English system.The conventional metaphor words gather to form many shared or culture-specific moral concepts in English and Chinese culture.It is the combination of building blocks in language systems contributes to the diversity of lexical elements.Secondly,by searching for two ontology databases,SUMO(Suggested Upper Merged Ontology)and Word Net,this study obtains the ontological structures of English and Chinese moral metaphor systems.In the ontological structure shared by English and Chinese,the terminal node corresponding with the largest number of target domain concept is “Subjective Assessment Attribute”,which includes concepts such as “hard”,“low”,“big”,“clean”,“high”,“pure”,“dirty”,and “cold”.In the English-specific ontological structure,the terminal node corresponding with the largest number of target domain concept is “Transfer”,which includes concepts such as“raise”,“lower”,“contact”,and “impact”.In the Chinese-specific ontological structure,the terminal node corresponding with the largest number of target domain concept is “Subjective Assessment Attribute”,including concepts such as “small”,“beautiful”,“high”,“deep”,and“balance”.The divergent principles for triggering specific conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese are influenced by the underlying knowledge systems of different language communities.Thirdly,by analyzing the etymologies of moral metaphor words in English and Chinese,this study suggests that the etymologies indicate language users’ randomly adaptive use of words at the initial stage.The huge differences between the ancient and modern word meanings not only reveal the formation,development,solidification,or demise of metaphor words,but also mirror the changes in natural materials,social culture,and thinking patterns in the English and Chinese language users’ environment.Fourthly,based on the Complex Adaptive System theory and the analysis of corpus data,this study proposes the self-adaptive emergence model of moral metaphor systems.There are three major elements,three requirements and four stages of the emergence of the system.The three major elements are communicative experience,cognitive mechanism,and social factors.The three requirements are nonlinearity,self-organization,and far-from-equilibrium.The four stages of emergence are the stage of random selection,the stage of adaptive selection,the stage from single-core to cluster,and the stage from cluster to emergence.The evolution of the system moves towards the direction of increasing fitness,a more orderly structure,a more stable system,and a more reasonable and rich organization of lexical elements.The innovations in the study are as follows.First of all,this study introduces the Complex Adaptive Systems theory,the frontier theory of modern science,to the study of moral metaphor systems,thus broadening the academic horizon of moral metaphor study.Moreover,this study adopts ontology,and the natural language processing techniques,to analyze the conceptual knowledge network,and utilizes BERT(Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers)model for semantic analysis,which enriches the methods that are applied to the moral metaphor research.Finally,this study investigates the lexical elements,ontological structure,microphase transition,and macro emergence of English and Chinese moral metaphor systems,and proposes the motivation elements,the requirements for the occurrence of emergence,the emergence model,the emergence stage and the direction of evolution of the self-adaptive emergence of moral metaphor systems,which deepens the understanding of their complexity.This study has positive implications for the development of the theory and methodology of current moral metaphor research.