A Cognitive Approach To Emotion Metaphors In English And Chinese

Emotions, as an important aspect of human experience, are at the center of human mental and social life. Happiness, anger, sadness and fear—these emotions are in nature abstract concepts. In order to have a better understanding and expression of these emotions, people often conceptualize them metaphorically. Metaphor allows us to comprehend a relatively complicated or abstract concept by virtue of a more familiar, more concrete concept, which is thus called a conceptual metaphor.This thesis makes a comparative study of happiness, anger, sadness, and fear metaphors in English and those in Chinese from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, with the aim of testifying the universality of the theory of conceptualization of emotions and the corresponding language expressions derived from English corpuses.In traditional rhetoric, metaphor is viewed as a particular rhetoric device different from the language people use in everyday life, employed especially in poetry. Guided by this idea, metaphor is considered decorative and ornamental in nature, thus a set of extraordinary or figurative linguistic expressions out of Norman language systems. Fortunately, with the reflections carried out by researchers in various disciplines, metaphor obtains rebirth through its connection with thought. The beginning of this new theory of metaphor is marked by the publication of Lakoff and Johnson's seminal work Metaphors We Live By in 1980. The central thought of the theory is that metaphor is pervasive and ubiquitous in language and thought. Human conceptual systems are inevitably structured by metaphors, which function at the deep level of human's thought and cognition and have systematic appearance in daily life. Metaphor in essence is a perceptual and conceptualizing tool, by which human beings understand the surrounding world.A large number of emotion metaphors in both English and Chinese are investigated in this thesis. After a comprehensive comparison of these emotion metaphors, some major conceptual metaphors are found to be shared by English and Chinese in the conceptualization of these four emotions. Concerning happiness and sadness, both English and Chinese employ the HAPPINESS IS UP or HAPPINESS IS LIGHT conceptual metaphor while SADNESS IS DOWN or SADNESS IS DARKNESS; in respect of ANGER, they have ANGER IS HEAT in common. These similarities can be attributed to the common human bodily experience of the two peoples. However, differences do occur between the two languages in describing these emotions. For example, English presumes HAPPINESS IS BIGN OFF THE GROUND, while Chinese regards HAPPINESS IS FLOWERS IN THE HEART. As for the central metaphor ANGER IS HEAT, English prefers the FLUID metaphor, while Chinese favors the GAS metaphor. Furthermore, when describing emotions through the physiological effects, Chinese tends to utilize more body parts, especially more internal organs to conceptualize these emotions. And it seems that the selection of certain body parts over others is not at random. The above differences cannot be well explained without resorting to the cultural models in which English and Chinese emotion metaphors are conditioned. And this thesis attempts to account for the differences by referring to the Yin-Yang Theory in Chinese philosophy, the Theory of Five Elements in traditional Chinese medicine, and the Chinese"union of heaven and man"opposite to the Western"binary of subject and object".