An Empirical Research On Chinese Preschoolers' (3～5 Year-old) Metaphoric Comprehension Of Basic Emotions

Cognitive linguistics assumes that metaphor serves not only as a rhetorical device in literary works but also as a mode of cognition, which plays an important role in formulating and perceiving the world. Basic emotions, as an important aspect of human experience,are at the center of human mental and social life, which are one of the most central and pervasive aspects of human experience. The abstract concept of basic emotions is expressed and understood via basic emotion metaphors. Therefore, the study of basic emotion metaphors has become a hot topic. However, most of study on this phenomenon has been done in adults, and the research on it in preschoolers is non-existent.This research based on Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory is to investigate Chinese preschoolers'understanding of basic emotion metaphors mapped onto five different source domains (natural color, body state, facial color, natural phenomenon, and orientation) presented under two kinds of situational contexts (pictorial context or verbal context with pictorial stimuli). On the one hand, three variables (age, source domain, contextual information) will be tested in terms of the effect on metaphoric comprehension so that the characteristics of metaphoric understanding of basic emotions in Chinese preschoolers will be revealed. On the other hand, it provides a detailed interpretation for Chinese preschoolers'early emerging metaphoric capacity of basic emotions in terms of body experience and contextual information, which gives a support to Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory and makes a contribution to the universal status of children's cognitive development to some extent.