A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On "Sea" Metaphors In English And Chinese

Metaphor study has always been a heat topic in academia. The history of metaphor study can be mainly divided into two stages:traditional metaphor study and modern metaphor study. In the traditional metaphor study, metaphor was regarded as a kind of figure of speech. The conceptual metaphor theory was proposed in the "Metaphors We Live By" by Lakoff&Johnson published in1980, which started a new stage for the modern metaphor study. The theory puts forward that the essence of metaphor is the process of understanding, experiencing, and expressing one kind of thing in terms of another. The working mechanism of metaphor is the mapping from the source domain to the target domain based on the similarity, which is also a cognitive mechanism based on physical experience embodied in our daily life. It is widely recognized that metaphor is not only a rhetorical phenomenon, but also a way of thinking. Metaphorical concept system suggests that metaphor is the intrinsic characteristics of human conceptual system. Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. It is a powerful tool of perceiving the world.The oceans take up seventy percent of the total area of the earth’s surface, which is closely related to human life. The exploration of sea has lasted for a long history. Along with the growing knowledge and exploration of the sea, especially the rise of "Age of Sail", many images associated with "sea" were derived in daily language."Sea" plays an irreplaceable role in our cognitive system. In the present paper, we comparatively studied the metaphor phenomenon of the "sea" both in English and Chinese from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. The quantitative analysis of the corpora in combination with the qualitative analysis under the guidance of conceptual metaphor theory was adopted as the main method. The similarities and differences of the "sea" metaphors from the two corpora are compared between English and Chinese. The underlying reasons for these similarities and differences will be further discovered and revealed.For those purposes, we first collected linguistic data in corpora. The main metaphorical expressions of "sea" in English and Chinese were collected and summarized. The linguistic data were derived from the two authoritative corpora: Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) for English and Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL), Peking University, for Chinese. Based on the classification, comparison and analysis of a large number of linguistic data of "sea", this paper draws the following conclusions:1) From the aspect of quality:there are a lot of metaphorical expressions of "sea" both in English and Chinese with various target domains.2) From the aspect of quantity: based on the calculation of linguistic data of English and Chinese, generally speaking,"sea" metaphors in Chinese are more pervasively used than in English. According to the attributes of sea, under the guidance of conceptual metaphor theory, and based on the linguistic data from English corpus COCA and Chinese corpus CCL, altogether twenty conceptual metaphors of "sea" have been abstracted in English and Chinese. Among the20target domains,9of them belong to English and11belong to Chinese, and6of them are shared metaphorical usages between English and Chinese. The6shared target domains are as follows:"sea" means change,"sea" means space,"sea" means virtue,"sea" means many/much,"sea" means challenge and "sea" means momentum. The unique3major target domains in English are state domain, color domain, and personage domain. The5unique target domains in Chinese are time domain, economics domain, brain or mind domain, love domain and a certain degree of something.3) The causes of those similarities can be attributed to the common perception and similar bodily experience of human beings, and the causes of those dissimilarities are categorized into the different geographical environment, differences in culture and the factor of race.The thesis is a corpus-based contrastive study of metaphors in English and Chinese, which belongs to cross-lingual and cross-cultural study. The contrastive study of conceptual metaphors involving "sea" in English and Chinese helps us gain a further insight into the relationship between language and culture. At the same time, the current study also owns certain implications and enlightenment of the foreign language teaching, English-Chinese translating and cross-cultural communication.