A Comparative Study Of The Conceptual System Of EATING Metaphors In English And Chinese From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

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 Aristotelian approach, the traditional linguistic approach, the pragmatic approach and the interaction approach. 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 reinforces 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 has become part of our everyday speech, and 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. Eating metaphor is in nature a kind of conceptual metaphor and it is a main cognitive method of human being. However, the study of eating metaphor is still not enough. Some scholars made a detailed classification and comparative study of eating metaphors in English and Chinese, but the classification of eating metaphor is not very perfect and satisfactory.In view of this factor, this paper takes up eating metaphor as its topic to study, based on the analysis of a large amount of linguistic data from English and Chinese in terms of eating metaphors. This paper puts forward a new conceptual metaphor about eating besides "GETTING IS EATING", that is "TAKING IS EATING". The two concepts differ in three aspects: volition, effect and feeling. That is to say, GET is performed by the subject without volition or the subject can be disadvantaged or will feel unpleasant. While TAKE is performed by the subject with volition or the subject can be advantaged or will feel pleasant. The research makes a comparative study of the two conceptual metaphors and discovers that Chinese and English share many main eating metaphors. These similarities reflect the fact that eating metaphors are primarily rooted in common human bodily experience both in English and Chinese. Meanwhile, they still have great differences from culture aspect: First, "the acquisition of taking is the acquisition of...