A Comparative Study Of Metaphor In English And Chinese Proverbs About Time

The metaphor, a hot topic in recent years, has been studied by scholars from various perspectives both at home and abroad. It is not merely a matter of language, but a method of thinking and an effective cognitive tool for human beings to understand abstract and untouchable concepts in terms of concrete and well-known ones. From the cognitive view, the metaphor is the systematical mapping across conceptual domains. Time, as an abstract and untouchable concept, is understood by people in terms of other concrete things.Proverbs, although without certain definition, have been widely accepted to be metaphorical by many scholars and researchers. Proverbs play important roles in people's daily life and their use of language. Both in English and Chinese cultures proverbs enjoy great attention. However, linguists have not paid enough attention to proverb studies.This thesis is a contrastive study of metaphors used in English and Chinese proverbs about time. That is, a comparison is made between the proverbs about time in the two languages from a perspective of metaphor studies. The data used in this study are collected from the Internet, as Internet covers a relatively large amount of data and the data are raw materials.Findings of this thesis show that similarities and differences exist in English and Chinese proverbs about time from the perspective of cognitive studies of metaphors. Although not all the differences can be fully accounted for, the author analyzes the similarities and differences based on Hofstede's cultural dimensions. Culture casts some influences on the creation of metaphorical proverbs.The present study is to contribute to the contemporary study of metaphor understanding by placing English and Chinese proverbs about time in a cross-cultural context. This thesis hopes to help deepen the study of metaphors, proverbs, and cross-cultural communications.