A Comparative Study Of Eye Metaphor In English, Chinese And Japanese

It is Lakoff and Johnson with their influential Conceptual Metaphor Theory that reinforces the trend of cognitive study on metaphor. According to this theory, the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. The basic cognitive rule for people to know the world is from the near to the far and from the concrete to the abstract. People from all parts of the world would follow the cognitive law that people regard one's own body as the measure of all things around. They apply the cognitive experience of human body to the cognition of other things and project the concept of human body to other concepts. Thus the important cognitive status of body metaphor has aroused more and more interests on the part of cognitive linguists. In view of these factors, this thesis takes up eye metaphor as its topic, based on the analysis of a large amount of linguistic data from English, Chinese and Japanese with special reference to eye metaphor.Human beings mainly acquire information about the outside world visually, so "eye" play a very important role in human's sensory system. Eye metaphors are pervasive in everyday language. Metaphoric senses of this body word are constructed through mappings from the domain of human being to other domains. In English, Chinese and Japanese, people use the word "eye" to indicate various aspects in the cognitive domain and educe different abstract meanings. These three cultures are not only uniform macroscopically but also diverse microcosmically, so eye metaphors in these three languages can show both commonness and individuality.This thesis is a study of metaphorical expressions based on "eye" in English, Chinese and Japanese within the framework of cognitive linguistics. It is hoped that this thesis can achieve three purposes:Firstly, it can provide readers with deeper understanding on eye metaphors and their meanings in the three languages. Secondly, it can help to find out the similarities and differences of eye metaphors in them, and to what extent they differ. Thirdly, it can provide evidence to the assumption that there exist universal conceptual metaphors.In order to achieve those purposes, the author divides this research into five parts. In the first part, we specify the study object of the thesis, and reveal the importance of the human body word "eye" in language and cognition. The word "eye" is not only powerful in word-formation, but also abundant in idiomatic expressions. In the second part, we apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory to the study of eye metaphor. Conceptual metaphor, mainly as a kind of conventional metaphor that has become part and parcel of our everyday speech, is an important concept in Conceptual Metaphor Theory. In the third part, we analyze of commonness and individuality in eye metaphorical mapping. The examples from English, Chinese and Japanese are collected to help conduct a cross linguistic comparison. In the fourth part, we summarize the findings of the cross linguistic comparison and makes a discussion about them. In the fifth part, we draw conclusions of the study and point out the significances of this thesis.