A Study Of Body Metaphor In English And Chinese From Cognitive Perspective

Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a particular rhetorical device,which has been studied for more than 2,000 years.However,in recent years,the view about metaphor has dramatically changed,especially with the publishing of Lakoff and Johnson's(1980) book Metaphors We Live By.Cognitive linguists hold that metaphor is not just a figure of speech; furthermore,it is an important means of man's thinking.Metaphor allows people to comprehend a relatively abstract concept by virtue of a more concrete concept.Metaphor, which belongs to a cognitive rather than linguistic phenomenon,plays important cognitive functions.Human beings experience with their bodies.The cognitive law that man cognizes things from the simple to the complex,from the concrete to the abstract,etc.determines the basic role of body parts in cognizing the world.For that reason,there are a large number of expressions with body parts in both English and Chinese,many of which are metaphorical. Body metaphor is a main cognitive method of human beings,by means of which,man perceives and understands the complicated and abstract concepts.Thus,body metaphor plays an important role in man's understanding the outside world.Although some scholars have done studies on body metaphor with modern metaphor theory,the study of body metaphor is not enough and deserves much more attention.The thesis,by employing cognitive linguistics and contemporary metaphor theory,from the perspective of body metaphor,analyzes how human beings utilize the cognition of their bodies and experiences to obtain the cognition of the material and of the abstract world through the study of body metaphorical expressions in English and Chinese.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One serves as an introduction.It briefly presents the historical development of metaphor,and introduces the significance of the study on body metaphor and the organization of this thesis.Chapter Two reviews the researches on metaphor abroad and in China.Chapter Three provides a general statement of the theoretical framework for this thesis,in which conceptual metaphor,experientialism,metaphorical mapping,and image schema are introduced.This chapter lays the foundations for the study of body metaphor from the cognitive point of view.The next two chapters are the main parts of this thesis.Chapter Four and Chapter Five approach body metaphor from the two aspects respectively:metaphorical mapping concerning body metaphor and image schemata concerning body metaphor.Chapter Four mainly probes into the metaphorical mapping concerning body metaphor,which discusses three models of metaphorical mappings: mapping from human body domain to non-human body domain;mapping from non-human body domain to human body domain;mapping within human body domain.Chapter Five discusses image schemata concerning body metaphor,in which eight image schemata are discussed:Container Schema,Path Schema,Balance Schema,Part-Whole Schema, Center-Periphery Schema,Up-Down Schema,Front-Back Schema,and Left-Right Schema. These two chapters are the application of cognitive metaphor theory in analyzing language phenomenon.And the study of body metaphor also proves the cognitive theory on metaphor. Chapter Six is the summary of the whole thesis,which points out that the study is still a tentative study from the cognitive perspective,and much remains to be judged and tested in the future.