A Comparative Study Of Emotion Conceptual Metaphors Between English And Chinese

Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a particular rhetoric device, employed especially in poetry. However, it is not enough just to study it as a rhetoric means or a linguistic phenomenon, for metaphor, as an important means of man抯 thinking, is involved in human cognitive process. In essence, metaphor is a perceptual and conceptualizing tool, by which man understands the changing world around. Therefore, metaphor, to be exact, belongs to a cognitive rather than a linguistic phenomenon. Whereby, it plays important cognitive functions: metaphor, first of all, falls into one of the fundamental devices for us to perceive the world we live in; secondly, metaphor serves as an important means to conceptualize experience; moreover, metaphor is an efficient source of new meanings and new ideas and thus makes it possible for us to view things involved in a new perspective. In short, metaphor has actually gone beyond the language and become an essential way by which man lives. As a basic cognitive structure, metaphor allows us to comprehend a relatively abstract concept by virtue of a more concrete concept, which is thus called conceptual metaphor.Conceptual metaphor, as an important concept in cognitive linguistics, refers to something internal, operating deep in human thought, such as ARGUMENT IS WAR and TIME IS MONEY Each conceptual metaphor heads and governs a system of linguistic metaphors, while metaphorical expressions in language are merely sufface manifestations of our underlying systematic conceptual metaphors. According to statistics, about 70 per cent of expressions in our daily language are derived from conceptual metaphors. In this sense, language is also primarily metaphorical in nature and studies on conceptual metaphors through analysis of linguistic expressions are really worthy of much attention and great efforts. Conceptual metaphors can be classified into three main types, namely, structural metaphors, orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors. With regard to the features, conceptual metaphors embody two prominent ones: systematicity and cultural coherence.Emotions, as an important aspect of human experience, have been among the focuses of cognitive linguistics. Emotions are conceptualized and expressed in metaphorical terms. In view of these factors, this paper takes up emotion conceptual metaphor as its topic to study. In addition, owing to the fact that extensive studies on emotions have mainly been done within the language of English and muchIICrattention has only been attached to two emotions梐nger and happiness, this paper attempts to conduct a cross-linguistic research into the conceptualization of emotion concepts. Based on the analysis of a large amount of linguistic data from English and Chinese, it tends to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese and English in terms of conceptual metaphors of four basic emotions including happiness, anger, sadness and fear. The research discovers that Chinese and English share many main conceptual metaphors. Take ANGER for example. Both English and Chinese utilize ANGER IS HEAT metaphor; in the respect of SADNESS, Chinese and English have DOWN, DARK, CONTAiNER, DISEASE and BURDEN metaphors in common etc. These similarities reflect the fact that conceptual metaphors both in Chinese and in English are primarily rooted in common human bodily experiences. Meanwhile, there still exist great differences in other conceptual metaphors and some specific linguistic expressions, such as, under the same conceptual metaphor ANGER IS HEAT, English adopts FIRE and FLUID metaphors, while Chinese selects FIRE and GAS metaphors. More evidently, in contrast to English, Chinese tends to use more body parts, especially internal organs in conceptualizing those emotions. These differences are largely due to different cultural models, since the bodily experience can only tell what are possible metaphors, and whether these potential metaphors are actually selected in a specific culture is mainly dependent upon the cul...