A Contrastive Study On Conceptual Metapphor Of"Sorrow" In English And "Beishang" In Chinese

Emotion is kind of embodied experience shared by all human beings and composed as an important part in our lives. However, previous studies on emotion were very limited due to its abstractness. With the emergence and development of cognitive linguistics especially conceptual metaphor, people gradually became aware of the intimacy between language, cognition and emotion. Basing on the close connection between emotion and cognition and metaphor, this paper makes a comparative analysis of "sorrow" in English and "beishang" in Chinese from a cognitive linguistic perspective.This paper makes a contrastive analysis on the "sorrow" in English and "beishang" in Chinese on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory. It first makes a contrastive analysis on conceptual metaphor of "sorrow" and "beishang" in language realization. Then it classifies the conceptual metaphor of "sorrow" and "beishang" and discusses their similarities and differences and the origin of similarities and differences.According to the analysis of the language expression of conceptual metaphor of sorrow both in English and Chinese, this paper found besides the same verb+metaphor, adjective+metaphor, and preposition+metaphor, there are some differences such as n+of+n metaphor existing in English and Chinese number metaphor. On the other hand, English and Chinese shared the approximately identical sorrow conceptual metaphor. They are "sorrow is container","sorrow is things in container","sorrow is burden","sorrow is living thing","sorrow is opponent","sorrow is illness","and sorrow is food". However, besides the sameness, there are some differences in each conceptual metaphor. Such as in the conceptual metaphor "sorrow is something in container", the "beishang" in Chinese prefers the application of air to liquid while the "sorrow" in English prefers liquid to air. The similarities of sorrow metaphor in English and Chinese can be attributed to the common human bodily experience and life experience shared by both Chinese and English peoples, while the differences may have been resulted from different cultural backgrounds and the different values of the speakers of the two languages. Meanwhile different language types may account for the cause of these differences.