A Contrastive Study Of Metaphorical Expressions Between English "Head" And Korean "Meli"

Since Lakoff stated his view of Conceptual Metaphor, the studies of metaphor have covered many fields in the cognitive linguistics, like behavior activities, ways of thinking, conceptual categories and linguistic symbols.As one of the most important body parts, English "head" and Korean"meli" are used so many that there are a number of metaphorical expressions. Chosen as the study subject of this paper, expressions of"head" and "meli" are divided into the metaphorical expressions as source domain and target domain according to the metaphorical theory, and each is divided into mapping to abstract domain and concrete domain.Based on the theory of modern metaphors in cognitive linguistics, the paper compares and analyzes metaphorical expressions of "head" and"meli " , trying to find out and explain the similarities and differences. Because of the similarities of the English-spoken and Korean-spoken people in the cognition patterns and the body structures, "head" and"meli" are used with similar concepts, hence there are many similar metaphor expressions. However, there are also some differences of metaphorical expressions between "head" and "meli" due to the differences in culture, thought patterns and languages.On the basis of contrastive study of the metaphorical expressions between "head" and "meli" , this paper explains the internal relation between semantic motivation and the metaphorical expressions of "head" and "meli" . The study argues that metaphorical thought is the important semantic motivation of various expressions of "head" and "meli" . It is helpful for us to acquire the polysemous words and idioms of "head" and "meli" .