A Cognitive Approach To Love Metaphors In English And Chinese

Metaphor is traditionally treated as a figure of speech, which is in nature anornament of language at the linguistic level. Traditional studies on metaphor weremainly confined to literature and rhetoric. With the development of cognitivelinguistics in1980s, the significance of metaphor has been realized from a newperspective, which made metaphor a hot topic in various disciplines. According tocognitive linguistics, metaphor is not only a matter of language, but also a matter ofcognition; it exists both in language and human being’s thinking and action. As animportant way of thinking and cognition, metaphor is closely related with humanbeing’s everyday activities. Metaphor is in essential to understand one thing in termsof another, thus being considerably helpful in human cognition of the world. In aword, metaphor is so important that it is something we live by, as is summarized byLakoff and Johnson, the pioneers of cognitive linguistics.Metaphor in cognitive linguistics refers to the conceptual metaphor in humanbeing’s thinking, instead of metaphorical expressions in language. Conceptualmetaphor allows us to understand the new and abstract concepts through thosefamiliar and concrete ones; metaphorical expressions in language derive fromconceptual metaphor and are merely specific and external manifestations ofconceptual metaphor. Metaphor can be thought of as a mapping from a source domainof literal, everyday experience to an abstract and obscure target domain. But themapping progress of metaphor is not at random, it’s rooted in human being’s bodilyexperience, including physiological interaction inside and the interaction with specificnatural and social environment etc.The statement that metaphor is rooted in bodily experience is prominentlyreflected through emotion, which is the most important experience of human beings.Emotion is so abstract that it has to be expressed by metaphors. In this way, it’s quite representative to make studies on emotion metaphor. Love is the most basic, prevalentand complicated emotion, which contains various kinds of concepts with abundantexpressions. There are a large number of love metaphors both in English and Chinese.In view of this, love metaphor becomes the subject of this thesis. A cross-culturalcomparative study of love metaphors in English and Chinese love songs is conductedaccording to cognitive linguistics. This thesis tries to explore the similarities anddifferences of conceptual system of love in the two languages, and then analyze thereasons for them. It is found that love is conceptualized in terms of some concreteconcepts; there are both similar love metaphors and different ones in the twolanguages. For instance,“Love is journey”,“Love is plant”,“Love is fire”,“Love iscontainer”,“Love is war” and “Love is commodity” can be found both in English andChinese. But “Love is nutrient” only exist in English while “Love is predestinedrelationship” only in Chinese. The similarities lie in the similar bodily experience,such as common physiological and psychological basis; the differences, however, arecaused by the two different cultures, like natural and living environment, religion andsocial values etc.The comparative study supports the contemporary views of metaphor: metaphoris omnipresent and plays a vital role in our understanding of the abstractions or eventhe world; metaphor is grounded on bodily experience and is characterized bycognitive universality and cultural variation. Based on sufficient English and Chinesedata, the study provides convincing evidence for the contemporary theories ofmetaphor. Hopefully, it can also be helpful in cross-cultural communication and theunderstanding of the relationship between language, culture and thinking.