A Cognitive Approach To Hand And Shou Metaphorical Extension In English And Chinese

In this paper, we are going to find out the reasons for meaning extension of hand and shou from a cognitive approach. First of all, according to the "prototype and basic category theory", we regard the two words as conceptual cognitive categories in mind with prototypes in center and burring boundaries. We also believe that the categories are developed through metaphors. Secondly, based on the statistic research of linguistic materials in selected dictionaries and corpus, we analyze the similarities and dissimilarities of the two words' meanings with cognitive semantics frame and we have concluded the conceptual metaphors and meaning chains for each category. In the end we compare the conceptual metaphors of the two words and their experiential basis for the meaning extensions and draw a conclusion.