A Comparative Study Of Spatial Metaphors In English And Chinese-From The Perspective Of Cognition

The study of metaphor has long aroused scholars' attention, which has a historyof more than two thousand years. Since the times of Aristotle, metaphor has beenstudied systematically, the studies of which cover different stages, including rhetoricviews, traditional views, interaction theory, pragmatic approach, and cognitive views.Ever since the publication of Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By in 1980, the studies havestepped into a totally new era.Lakoff's conceptual metaphor is the theoretical foundation of this thesis. Morespecifically, the term of image-schema which derives from our daily experience andfunctions as the cognitive basis of metaphor is indispensable, and the most importantterm is metaphorical mapping, which is regarded as the essential part of the workingmechanism of metaphors and which makes the metaphorical extensions of spatialdomains onto other target domains possible and feasible. Besides, the metaphoricalmappings cross different domains also manifest asymmetric features, the reason ofwhich should be attributed to different cultural models of traditions between Chineseand English. As to the reasons for symmetric features, it should be the commonexperiential grounding, either physical or environmental.Human beings exist in certain time and space, fi'om which we acquire the mostoriginal cognitive abilities. Compared with time, the concept of space is morefundamental, in that the abstract temporal concepts we have known so far areestablished on the basis of spatial concepts. We acquire the most direct and intelligiblephysical experience from the domain of space. Therefore, there are a great manycognition models which take the domain of space as the source domain and reveal themost essential relationship between cognition and linguistic expressions. We cognizethe whole world through our cognition of the domain of space, and then the conceptof space can be regarded as the starting point of our primitive cognition and the basisofcognizing other domains.In this thesis, the comparison between "shang/xia"(上/下) and "up/down","qian/hou"(前/后) and "front/back", "zuo/you"(左/右) and "left/right" are carried outrespectively in terms of four aspects, i.e. quantity, social status, states, and time. Theemphasis of this thesis is assigned to the discussions of the first group for somereasons.