A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Emotion Metaphors From The Theoretical Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

Metaphor had been only regarded as a figure of speech by scholars before. And we know famous scholars Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live By which began to accelerate the research of metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson thought that metaphor was not only a rhetorical means, but also an important cognitive tool. Metaphor can play an important role so that it is used to create and understand thinking and language by us. Metaphor is pervasive in our daily life and it not only exists in language, but also in action and thought. We learn that metaphor has a source domain, target domain, and mapping from source domain to target domain. People can comprehend the target domain by source domain.Emotion is the most basic and common experience of human beings. Human emotion is abstract and it is always expressed by metaphor and metonymy. The research on emotion metaphors was mainly concentrated in happiness, sadness, anger, love and so on by scholars. Few scholars paid more attention to the research on pride, surprise, fear and anxiety metaphors. So the paper is the research of similarities and differences of metaphor expression on pride, surprise, fear and anxiety emotions between English and Chinese. The research has significance in intercultural communication and language teaching.Lakoff and Johnson put forward the famous theory that was called the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and the theory was very important for us to comprehend metaphor further more. The paper applies Conceptual Metaphor Theory to analyze emotion metaphors in English and Chinese from cognitive perspective on the basis of assimilating the research achievements of metaphors abroad and at home. The thesis consists of five parts. At first the author introduces the objective and significance of the study, then the development of metaphors and emotion metaphors abroad and domestically are summed up. And comments on emotion metaphors abroad and at home are discussed. The next the author uses the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and analyzes its classification, experience basis, working mechanism and feature. The similarities and differences of conceptual metaphor expressions on pride, surprise, fear and anxiety emotions between English and Chinese are discussed by the analysis of a large amount of English-Chinese corpus. And the causes for similarities and differences are discussed here. The author attributes the similarities of emotion metaphors in the two languages to the common body experience and universal cognition. At the same time the understanding of emotion metaphors is different because there is different natural environment, geographical environment, custom and so on in two countries.The thesis takes pride, surprise, fear and anxiety metaphors as examples to analyze emotion metaphors in English and Chinese from the theoretical perspective of conceptual metaphor.The author analyzes the similarities and differences of emotion metaphors and the causes for similarities and differences. Due to the limited condition and the limited ability of author, emotion metaphor area deserves further studying.