A Cognitive Account Of The Metaphorical Expressions Related To Human Body

In the phenomenon of metaphorical cognition, the most basic and common one is no more than the human-body metaphor. People know the objective world through the metaphorical cognition of human body initially, and the human-body metaphor is the most general way of thinking for the primitive people. Because the basic cognitive rule for the people to know the world is from the near to the far and from the concrete to the abstract, the people from all parts of the world always following the cognitive law, that is people always regard one's own body as the measure of all things around, they applying the cognitive experience of human body to the cognition of other things, and projecting the concept of human body to the other concepts, hence the construction of new concepts, and this is called human-body metaphor. The primitive people projected their own experience of the parts and organs of the body to the external world in the form of various ways, so there are many words and sentences made of human organ words (including nouns, verbs and adjectives) via metaphor. It is obvious that the human-body metaphorical way of thinking should be one of the most important and most general thinking ways of the primitive people. That is to say, people regard their own body as the standard to measure all things around; they project each part of the body onto the objective material world by various ways, and getting to know the world by the cognitive way of human-body metaphorization.The research object of this study is metaphorization based on human body, which not merely includes the human body metaphor, but also includes the study of emotion, expression and sense organ words of the human body. We also attempt to give an explanation to the motivations of metaphorical expression related to human body from a cognitive perspective. The motivations are involving many aspects, such as cognition, language, social, cultural and psychological aspects and so on.The thesis is composed of the following parts: Chapter One as the introduction mainly introduces the research background, purpose of research, research approach, data collection and thesis frame of this study.Chapter Two is the literature review, which chiefly reviews the current study on the human body metaphor from different angles.Chapter Three deals with the theoretical basis of this study, discussing the mapping theory, image schemata and experientialism.Chapter Four is about the relation between human body and metaphorical expressions, dealing with the origin of the human-body metaphorization; mapping basis of the human-body metaphorization; metaphorical expressions related to human body words; working mechanism of metaphorical expressions related to human body words; metaphorical study on emotion and sense organ words of the human body.Chapter Five addresses the cognitive causes of metaphorical expressions related to human body, investigating into the cognitive, linguistic, social and cultural causes of metaphorical expressions related to human body.The last chapter is the conclusion, including a summary of the whole study, the significance and limitations of this study and suggestions for further study.