A Contrastive Study Of Metaphorical Thought At The Lexical Level Between English And Chinese

The thesis aims at studying the metaphorical thought at the lexical level between English and Chinese. By analyzing a large number of metaphorical expressions in our everyday language, we can get some of the rules of universalities existing in human beings'metaphorical thought on the one hand; on the other hand, we can get the differences of metaphorical thought between English and Chinese. The study is based on the theories conducted by cognitive linguists who claim that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but in thought and action. The essence of metaphor is the mapping between two different domains. Owing to this reason, they also hold that our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Owing to the reason, they propose that our thought is metaphorical, that is we have metaphorical thought. Therefore, according to their theories on metaphorical thought, we can get that metaphorical thought is a way of thought, especially a way of abstract thought, which makes people make use of their concrete and known concepts to cognize the abstract and unknown concepts. Under the mechanisms of metaphorical thought, they claim that we firstly thought by means of metaphorized concepts, and then we express them in terms of metaphorical language, in which it is the metaphorical thought that gives rise to the metaphorical concepts and languages. Therefore, in the light of contemporary cognitive theorists'view, metaphor refers to the conceptual mapping, while the everyday metaphorical expression refers to an individual linguistic expression (a word, phrase or sentence) that is sanctioned by a mapping (metaphor).Hence, based on these theories of metaphor, metaphorical thought and metaphorical expressions, the thesis gives a contrastive analysis of metaphorical thought at lexical level between English and Chinese from different perspectives. Based on the analysis of metaphorical expressions at lexical level, the thesis can get that there are similarities of metaphorical thought between English and Chinese, namely, both English and Chinese make use of the concrete concepts to cognize the abstract ones, their own body to measure other concepts and the known concepts to cognize the unknown one. However, under the influence of the differences of culture and living environment, there are also differences, that is, the same concept will be represented by different substances; the same substance will represent different concepts; the asymmetric metaphorical thought can be found between them.In order to make the conclusion more convincing, the thesis adopts the linguistic expressions from corpuses, dictionaries and ect..