A Contrastive Study Of Plant 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. Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory reinforces the trend of cognitive study on metaphor. According to this cognitive 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, that has become part of our everyday speech, is an important concept in Conceptual Metaphor theory. Conceptual metaphors are rooted in our bodily experience. Plant metaphor is in nature a kind of conceptual metaphor and it is a main cognitive method of human being. However, few scholars have extended their antennae into the field of contrastive study of plant metaphor. There are few comprehensive and systemic studies on plant metaphorization and contrast of plant metaphors in English and Chinese. The former contrastive studies on plant terms mainly focused on the differences of the culture-loaded meanings of certain plant words. In view of these factors, this paper takes up plant metaphor as its subject to study, based on the analysis of a large amount of linguistic data from English and Chinese in terms of plant metaphors. The research discovers some common features of plant metaphors in English and Chinese. The similarities in mapping models reflect the fact that there exists cognitive universality in plant metaphor due to the common basic body experience. Meanwhile, there still exist great differences: First, Chinese is rich in plant metaphors about characters and moralities, while English tends to use plants denote gods and goddesses. Secondly, "flower language", namely, the mapping from a flower to an appointed sentiment or intention, is unique in English, and there is no such mapping in Chinese. Thirdly, the mapping domains of plant metaphors in English are wider than in Chinese. There are plant metaphors about money, finished products, ammunition, equipments, sports items and machines in English, while in Chinese, the mapping domains are much narrower. Fourthly, the plants that Chinese and English attach importance to are different. Flowers and trees have rich metaphorical meanings in Chinese, while in English, vegetables, fruits and grains are more commonly used to denote concrete and abstract things. The fifth difference is the preponderance of nouns in Chinese and verbs in English. Most plant terms in Chinese are mapped onto nominal domains with few onto verbal ones, while in English, plant terms are often mapped onto the verbal domains directly, thus the nouns are transformed into verbs directly. These differences are largely due to cultural relativity and nationality. Hence, this paper tries to account for these differences by referring to the differences in natural environments, thinking models, aesthetic standards, national literature traditions, social conventions and linguistic forms.This paper makes a relatively complete study of plant metaphors from the cognitive perspective. Based on the contrastive study in English and Chinese, this research reinforces that plant metaphor is characterized by cognitive universality and cultural relativity. Meanwhile, it will, to a certain degree, supplement the study of plant metaphor.