Metaphorical Study Of Chinese Food Expressions

Metaphor is rampant in our daily language. It is the fundamental way for people toknow the world and express ideas. More importantly, it is the way of thinking. In1980,Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live By in which metaphor was regardedfrom a cognitive perspective and it fell under cognitive linguistics.Life is full of metaphors. As the most basic material foundation for people to survive,food is used as the object for metaphor. In daily communication, food metaphor is widelyutilized by people. They always use food to compare other abstract or strange conceptswith the aim of making the description more vivid and understood more easily.Based on reference point theory, conceptual metaphor theory and other relevanttheories, this thesis attempts to have a systematic study on food metaphors from theperspective of cognition. It explores the linguistic structural features and metaphoricalmodels of food metaphors. With Modern Chinese Dictionary being the source, the authorlooked into the dictionary page by page to find out the food metaphors. Many commonlyused food metaphors in daily life are not collected in Modern Chinese Dictionary,therefore, the author collected those metaphors from papers, magazines or books. Afterthis work was done, food metaphors used for this thesis were picked out. Each foodmetaphor would be retrieved in CCL (Center for Chinese Linguistics) to find the examplesentences. With selected food metaphors and example sentences being the corpus, thelinguistic features and metaphorical models were identified. In terms of linguisticstructural features, food metaphors are classified into three categories: noun plus noun(N+N) metaphors; modifier (e.g.: adjective) plus noun (M+N) metaphors; verb (plusmodifier) plus noun metaphors (V+M+N) metaphors. Due to different linguistic structures,the focus of each structure is also different. With analysis on the food metaphors,metaphorical models are identified. There are three metaphorical models: reference pointmodel, meaning association model and conceptual metaphor model. There are many foodmetaphors in each model and each metaphor falls into different models. The modelsintersect with each other and cooperatively contribute to the understanding of foodmetaphors. This thesis studies the food metaphors in detail to make a summarization of thelinguistic structural features and metaphorical models of food metaphor, which will makea clear train of thought to help people understand food metaphors from the origin. Byanalysis the trend of linguistic structural features and metaphorical models can bepredicted. Meanwhile, the research results can also be applied to help the teaching of foodmetaphors.