A Comparative Analysis Of English And Chinese Conceptual Metaphor For Basic Human Emotions

The study of metaphor dates back to as early as2000years ago. According to Aristotle’s traditional metaphor theory, metaphor is just a rhetorical device on the level of words and a deviation from the ordinary mode of working of language. In the1970s, there was a boom of metaphor research. With the reflection carried out by research in various disciplines, metaphor obtains rebirth through its connection with thought. Among them, the most important theory is the conceptual metaphor, which is represented by Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal book Metaphor We Live By in1980. They hold that metaphor is not referred to as a kind of linguistic expression but one important way of the cognitive world, which is the process of understanding one thing in terms of another. However, contemporary cognitive linguistics argues that metonymy is a kind of cognitive mechanism just as important as metaphor. Metonymy employs certain notable features of one thing to refer to the same thing.Emotion, as one of the most universal and basic parts of human thought, is an important aspect of human experience. Human emotion is abstract and abundant in language and interacts with cognition. In order to express human emotion lively and accurately, we usually conceptualize them. Metaphor plays an important role in the conceptualization of emotion. Emotional metaphor refers to metaphorical language, through which human being can express their emotions. And through the study of emotional metaphor, people’s perception towards the outside world can also be explored. Besides, studies of idioms expressing emotions are mainly based on the English linguistic data, therefore, the comparative studies of English and Chinese idioms expressing emotions are comparatively rare.Thus, the thesis tries to make a comparative study of English and Chinese idioms expressing emotions. It takes emotion idioms expressing happiness, anger, sadness, and fear in English and Chinese as the object of study. It aims at testifying the common applicability and cultural particularity of the theories in the conceptualization of emotions and idiomatic expressions in the English data. The study shows that like English, Chinese mainly conceptualizes emotions by means of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy as well. On the one hand, both English and Chinese follow the same metonymical principle:the emotions are expressed through the physiological, psychological or behavioral reactions. Moreover, conceptual metonymy often serves as the cognitive foundation of conceptual metaphors in the conceptualization of emotions. On the other hand, there exist many similar conceptual metaphors and conceptual metonymies in English and Chinese in the conceptualization of emotions, based on which many similar metaphorical idiomatic expressions are generated. Of course, the differences are natural. Last but not the least, we hold that the commonness in the conceptualization of emotion and metaphorical idiomatic expressions mainly lies in the same bodily experience whereas the differences mainly result from different cultural models.