A Corpus-based Study On Chinese And English Conventionalized Taste Metaphor

Metaphor has been a heated topic even from Aristotle's times, when it was thought of as a rhetorical tool and was studied from the perspective of pure language. But things began to change since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson's book Metaphors We Live By in 1980. In this book, they claimed metaphors are pervasive in our daily language, and they are the way we conceptualize the world around us. At the same time, they pointed out metaphors are grounded in our bodily experience and life experience.Metaphors exist in the domain of taste as well. Many terms in the taste domain are used to refer to some more abstract concepts, such as emotions. With a view to finding out the regularities of conventional taste metaphor both in English and in Chinese, a corpus-based research is conducted and four words of taste category(苦,辣,酸and"甜"in Chinese and"bitter","pungent","sour"and"sweet"in English are examined. The results show that there are abundant metaphorical expressions with the words of taste category both in Chinese. To a certain extent, the Chinese expressions accord with English ones. Both languages use the same source domain to metaphorize the target domain. For example sweet smile, sweet voice, bitter smile, pungent comments/ remarks in English conform to甜美的微笑,苦笑,辛辣的评论in Chinese. What's more, they even have the same meaning. Despite the similarities, differences are also obvious. Based on the metaphorical expressions, we manage to summarize the conceptual metaphors of the taste category. The similarities between Chinese and English metaphorical expressions result from the similarities of human beings'cognitive model. Human beings'cognitive model is formed during the interaction between man and the world. Metaphorical expressions are a special form, condensing a special way of human beings to experience and understand the world. Another reason is the assimilation of cultures allows the languages to borrow from each other. The differences between the Chinese and English metaphors of taste category will also be discussed. Meanwhile, the directionality of synaesthetic metaphors is explored as well.This thesis aims to provide more information for English-Chinese understanding and translation by examining people's most familiar experiences. Since people are likely to be affected by their mother language when encountering metaphorical expressions in another language and the differences between the two languages are likely to be ignored, which will lead to misunderstanding and inappropriate translations.