A Cultural Approach To English And Chinese Body Metaphor

Ever since Aristotle asserted "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor", metaphor has aroused attention and passion from all kinds of researchers. Traditionally, metaphor was viewed as a matter of language, as a set of extraordinary or figurative linguistic expressions whose meaning is reducible to some set of literal propositions. According to this view, metaphor is primarily decorative and ornamental in nature. It was called "a figure of speech", and its study was confined mostly to literature and rhetoric, so the vast majority of these scholars have focused on metaphor as a distinctive use of language that has various rhetorical functions. Recently, however, with the blooming of cognitive science, some scholars have begun to dig deeper into the topic, investigating the possibility that metaphor is not only a form of speech, but also more fundamentally a form of thought, casting a light on the cultural perspective of metaphor. As far as human cognition is considered, metaphorization is always to explain or understand a comparatively abstract domain with the help of a comparatively concrete domain, which results in the dispensability of metaphor during the development of human cognition., As a common language phenomenon and cognition mode we live by, metaphor is influenced by the social cultural background and shows obvious cultural characteristics. Although some Chinese scholars have made elaborate contrastive studies of English and Chinese body metaphors, they did not try too much in explaining thoroughly the causes for the similarities and differences from a cultural perspective. The present author chooses a special range of metaphor—body metaphor as the research object, for the study of body metaphor deserves our enough attention. This paper attempts to explore the question of the relationship between culture models and metaphor, giving a close and systematic examination to the different manifestations of metaphor in English and Chinese languages on the basis of the comparative study of body metaphors in the two languages. Our basic hypothesis is like this: such a universal cognitive phenomenon as metaphor must tell us a lot about the universalities and individualities of the diverse cultures in the world, including English culture and Chinese culture.