| The cognitive law that man cognizes the world is that people always regard one’s own body as the measure of all things around, and project the cognitive experience of human body to other external, unfamiliar and abstract things, hence constructing the new concepts, and this is called human body metaphor. Therefore, it can be seen that human body and organs are the base for human beings to cognize the world. The heart is one of the most important parts of body and controls all blood in the human body, therefore, it has close associations with human activities, then, playing a pivotal role in constructing and understanding the concepts.Under the guidance of experientialism and the theory of Image Schema by Lakoff and Johnson, this thesis, based on a great deal of linguistic data collected, explores the meaning construction of heart metaphors from different perspectives and levels by adopting the following methods:comparison and combination of description and explanation. The thesis constructed three cognitive models of "heart" lexicons, they are:"heart as entity","heart as container","heart as living organism". Meanwhile, the thesis will explore the contractual motivation of each "heart" expression and have a metaphorical analysis of each model by virtue of the theory of Image Schema. The data are mainly from the corpus BNC, the corpus CCL and the corpus CEO. Based on the corpora, Chinese and English dictionaries help with analyzing each group of the metaphorical expressions containing body part term "heart". The total number of the collected data is321with129in English and192in Chinese. They are mainly phrases, idioms and sentences. The research discovers that to a great extent, heart metaphors are similar in English and Chinese because of common basis physically and psychologically. These similarities reflect that body metaphors are mainly rooted in common human bodily experience both in English and Chinese. However, under the influences of different contexts and cultures, heart metaphors have different models in English and Chinese, reflecting the discrepancy in recognition orientation between China and western countries, which embodies that different nations have different abilities in terms of recognizing new things, constructing new concepts, establishing the consequence mechanism, then, forming thinking ways and understanding the external world.This thesis makes a relatively all-round study of comparison of conceptual metaphors of English heart and Chinese xin in terms of cognitive perspectives and supplements the research on heart metaphors to some extent. Meanwhile, it proves metaphor’s cognitive nature and metaphorical nature of human thinking. In addition, this research will be helpful to the vocabulary teaching in English and Chinese. |
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