A Contrastive Study Of Body Metaphors In English And Chinese

Metaphor has traditionally been studied by scholars in the fields of rhetoric and linguistics. The main theories of this tradition can be summarized as the Comparison theory, the Substitution theory and the Interaction theory. Over the past two decades metaphor study has become increasingly popular in the field of cognitive science. It is Lakoff and Johnson with their influential Conceptual Metaphor theory that reinforce the trend of cognitive study on metaphor. According to this theory, the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. Our ordinary conceptual system by means of which we live, think and act is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.Conceptual metaphor, mainly conventional metaphor, that has become part of our everyday speech, is an important concept in Conceptual Metaphor theory. Conceptual metaphors are rooted in our bodily experience. Human body undoubtedly has the most important cognitive status in human being's cognition. Body metaphor is in nature a kind of conceptual metaphor, namely, ontological metaphor and it is a main cognitive method of human being. However, the study of body metaphors is still not enough. Some scholars at home made a delicate classification and contrastive study of body metaphors in English and Chinese, but they didn't explain these differences between the two languages form the aspect of culture and the classification of body metonymies is not very perfect and satisfactory. In view of these factors, this paper takes up body metaphor as its topic to study, based on the analysis of a large amount of linguistic data from English and Chinese in terms of body metaphors. The research discovers that Chinese and English share many main body metaphors. These similarities reflect the fact that body metaphors are primarily rooted in common human bodily experience both in English and Chinese. Meanwhile, there still exist great...