The Conceptualization Of Sadness Metaphor

Metaphor viewed as a matter of language in tradition appeals to rhetoricians and literary critics for more than 2000 years. Aristotle's view-"metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else" (from Ricoeur, 1975: 13)梙as dominated western theories on metaphor for centuries. Guided by this myth, metaphor is considered decorative and ornamental in nature, thus a set of extraordinary or figurative linguistic expressions out of normal language systems. Fortunately, with the reflections carried out by researchers in various disciplines, metaphor obtains rebirth through its connection with thought. The beginning of this new theory of metaphor is marked by the publication of Lakoff and Johnson's seminal book Metaphors We Live By in 1980. The central thesis of the theory is that metaphor is pervasive and ubiquitous in language and thought. Thereby metaphor should be a figure of thought, the conceptual systems of which are structured by metaphor plus other kinds of imaginative structures. Metaphor in essence is a perceptual and conceptualizing tool, by which human beings understand the surrounding world. Moreover, metaphor serves as an efficient source from which new meanings and new understanding rise if constructed from a new perspective. In a word,metaphor is cognitive rather than linguistic.Metaphor in cognitive linguistics virtually refers to conceptual metaphor, which is different but related to linguistic metaphor or linguistic metaphorical expression. Conceptual metaphor allows us to comprehend a relatively abstract concept by virtue of a more concrete concept. Linguistic metaphor is merely the surface manifestation of the underlying conceptual metaphor. Each conceptual metaphor governs a set of linguistic metaphor systematically. Conceptual metaphors can be classified according to the cognitive functions they perform into three types: structural metaphor, ontological metaphor, and orientational metaphor. Conceptual metaphor is characterized by a set of systematic correspondences between the source and the target, namely mappings. Nevertheless, those metaphorical mappings are not at random but constrained by the so-called image-schemas, which emerge from our bodily experience. Therefore, metaphor is grounded on and rooted in bodily experience, either the physiological interactions inside body or human interactions with the physical world or the social interactions. Metaphor is closely linked to other "tropes" like metonymy and personification coming up in this dissertation.The claim that metaphor is constrained by human bodily experience stands most prominently in the domain of emotion. Emotions are often expressed in language. As emotions are elusive to grasp, the abstract concept of emotions is largely conceptualized in terms of a variety of metaphors. This dissertation conducts a cross-linguistic research on the sadness metaphors in English and Chinese in an attempt to probe how shared experience as well as cultural variation influences the conceptualization of sadness metaphor and the comparison is expected to reinforce some fundamental views on emotion metaphor and the notion of embodiment in cognitive linguistics. The choice of sadness as the study object is not made at will, but due to the fact that much attention has only been attached to emotions more prototypical in the English spoken countries such as happiness, anger, love, while less to other basic emotion categories like sadness which is quite common in the oriental countries. About fifty eminent verses representative both in Chinese and English are picked out for a case study. The research discovers that Chinese and English share similarities in some major conceptual metaphors on sadness, like container metaphor, and they observe the same metonymic principles in the metaphorical expressions of sadness. Meanwhile, differences as expected also exist in theconceptualization of sadness between these two languages. However, whether similarities or variation in the conceptual structures of...