A Contrastive Study Of Culture Of Time Conceptual Metaphors In English And Chinese

In order to make a successful cross-cultural communication, a thorough comprehension of cultural universality and variation is indispensable. As the core of a cultural system, cultural values play an important role in cross-cultural communication. The paper makes a contrastive study of Time Conceptual Metaphors in English and Chinese which display the cultural values of the two nations by taking cultural values as the penetrating point.Apart from Introduction and Conclusion, the paper consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 is about the literary review. In it firstly a definition of culture, values and cultural values are given. The culture that is talked about in the paper refers in particular to the culture from the perspective of anthropology, which includes the deposit of knowledge, experience, values, notions of time, spatial relations, etc. Values are the core of covert culture and play an instructive and mandatory role in human action. Cultural values refer to the governing ideas and principles for thought and action in a given society that tend to permeate a whole culture. Then the chapter gives a brief statement of three traditional theories of metaphor, that is, the Comparison theory, the Substitution theory and the Interaction Theory which only regard metaphor as a rhetorical device of language.After pointing out the deficiencies of the traditional metaphor theories, the writer is engaged in an introduction of some basic ideas of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, a great achievement of cognitive linguistics in Chapter 2, such as the working mechanism, properties and classification of Conceptual Metaphor.Then in the next chapter an exposition of the comparability of English and Chinese conceptual metaphors is made from the following four aspects, which paves the way for the following cross-cultural study of conceptual metaphors: 1) generality of English and Chinese languages;2) similarity of cultural stipulations of metaphors in English and Chinese;3) same origin; 4) same functions of metaphors in English and Chinese.Chapter 4 focuses on a contrastive study of Time Conceptual Metaphors in English and Chinese which is displayed by TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS SPACE and TIME IS MOVING ENTITY. The result of such a contrastive study shows clearly that there are both similarities and differences in Time Conceptual Metaphors in English and Chinese. And the metaphorical ways of expression are both same and different, thus revealing the cross-cultural universality and the cross-cultural variation in the formation and understanding of metaphors. In the chapter, the writer also explains what causes such sameness and difference, i.e. human cognition possesses a good deal of generality and similar living experience ,which helps form the universality of conceptual metaphors while the variation of conceptual metaphor results from the influence of some given national cultures.Metaphor is a basic cognitive phenomenon of human beings. It is deeply rooted in human language, thinking and culture. The contrastive study of conceptual metaphors taking cultural values as a penetrating point hopes to encourage an in-depth study of values and culture, and to some extent, instruct the performance of researches on English and Chinese languages and on cross-cultural communication.