A Cognitive Study On Spatial Metaphors In English And Chinese

Cognitve metaphor has greatly aroused so much scholars and linguists interested in language for more than 2000 years. Traditionally, metaphor was extrmely thought of as a set of extraordinary figurative expressions in language use. However, with the increasingly development of cognitive linguistics in the past decades, many people have begun to reconsider the multi-dimensional functions and effects of metaphor. The structure, mechanism, functions and cognitive features of metaphor have become the hot topics in linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, pedagogy and physiology among which cognitive functions are universally acknowledged as the new force of study in cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguists greatly stated that metaphor is not merely a matter of language, but a mode of thought and an effective cognitive tool for human beings to get to know the abstract, non-spatial, tangible things in terms of spatial, concrete and non-tangibel ones. There exists a close correlation between cognitive metaphor and the thought of the mass people as well as their own special culture.One scope of conceptual metaphor studied by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) is orientational metaphor, which made a great contribution to the formation of people's abstract concept. The orientational metaphor uses image schema as its tool for study, and makes the image schematic structure of spatial concept mapped onto that of the domain of abstract concept. Precious studies on the orientational metaphor were carried out on the basis of cognitive semantic investigation of prepositions. However, they did not make a comprehensive investigation; there is still a room to improve. This thesis aims to study locative上/下(in Chinese) and UP/DOWN(in English) and has found that:(1) Both SHANG/XIA and UP/DOWN are used to structure the same five target domains, namely QUANTITY, STATES, SOCIAL HIERARCHY, TIME and SENSE. In these five domains, what is oriented Shang in Chinese is also oriented up in English (The only except is that AN EARLIER TIME IS SHANG, but A LATER TIME IS UP in English); and what is oriented Xia is also oriented down.(2)The research into the analysis of image schema within orientational metaphor shows that the comprehension of English prepositions up and down can be realized by means of five domains, namely QUANTITY, STATES, SOCIAL HIERARCHY, TIME and SENSE, and this can help the promotion of English learning for the students in Middle Schools and Universities.