A Comparative Study On Chinese And Thai Facial Organ Words From A Cognitive Perspective

Based on Cognitive Linguistics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this paper is acomparative study on Chinese and Thai facial organ words from a cognitive perspective, with“face” and “eyes” words in Chinese and Thai as the paper’s specified research object. Thestudy is aimed to analyze and classify metonymical and metaphorical meanings of the wordsin the two languages, with the goal of finding out the similarity and dissimilarity fromConceptual Metaphor Perspective.Chapter one is the preface. It reviews the literature on the study. It also introduces thesource of the study, theoretical backgrounds, the value of the study, the target, themethodology and corpus used in the study.Chapter two compares “face” words in Chinese （“脸、面”）and Thai（“?”）. Thefindings show “face” words in Chinese and Thai are all used with concrete metaphors, whichincludes Ontological Metaphor, Container Metaphor, Orientational Metaphor and ColorMetaphor. As for abstract metaphors, the two languages are similar in terms of the ways theyare expressed and metaphorical meanings they can convey. However, there’re somesignificant differences between them. In Chinese, metaphors can be used to express meaningsconcerning flowers, short time, personality and some behaviors; In Thai, metaphors can beused to convey Orientational Metaphor like “up, front and back” concept and further toproject concept of time. Behavior and season meanings can also be expressed with theabstract metaphor.Chapter three compares “eyes” words in Chinese（“眼、目”）and Thai（“?”）. Thestudy finds that, the two languages all use Ontological Metaphor, Container Metaphor,Orientational Metaphor and Color Metaphor to express the abstract concept, and7abstractmeanings can be expressed in both of the two languages. However, Chinese words with “眼、目”can express concrete meanings like ’’deep-shallow" and "down-front-center" and there’re11abstract metaphorical meanings in total. On the other hand, Thai words with “?”can express concepts like "EYES ARE TOY", and "emotion" can be expressed with colormetaphor. There are7other abstract meanings expressed by metaphors in Thai.Chapter four is the summary of the paper. It also points out issues to be addressed in thefuture.