A Cognitive Investigation Into The Metaphor Of Chinese "Cao" And English "Grass"

The research of metaphor has experienced a long process which can be traced back to Aristotle. Traditionally, metaphor in such a long time has been viewed as merely a figure of speech or unusual phenomenon at the word level of lexical devices. Since the 1970s, with the rise of contemporary cognitive linguistics, researchers have been striving to get out of word level, cast off the shackles of traditional metaphorical theory based on literature and rhetoric, and redefine metaphor from cognitive perspective. In 1980, the book-Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff & Johnson was regarded as the symbol of cognitive metaphor theory. This book interprets metaphor as a cognitive device rooted in abstract concept of human thinking. Since then researchers in various fields start to explore new perspectives such as emotion metaphor, body metaphor, animal metaphor, etc in accordance with human experiential basis. Additionally, a lot of researches on cognitive metaphor theory have been carried out to probe into the working mechanism of human thinking, which maps basic concepts onto other abstract concepts through metaphoric mode. All of these discussed above have provided experiential basis and reference value for continuous development of cognitive metaphor theory."Cao" and "Grass" are ubiquitous. They are plants in most and earliest touch with human beings. On basis of human beings’ abundant cognitive accumulation, "Cao" and "Grass" have become remarkable images in literature works, generating plenty of metaphorical expressions. However, previous metaphor studies generally pay attention to several typical objects. So far there is scarcely any research on Chinese "Cao" metaphor and English "Grass" metaphor. This thesis focuses on 248 items of "Cao" metaphor and "Grass" metaphor (see appendix) included in Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary (the 7th Edition), The Great Chinese Dictionary, The Great Chinese Idiom Dictionary, Chinese National Corpus, CCL Corpus of Chinese Philology Research Center in Beijing University, Corpus of Contemporary American English, and British National Corpus. This thesis aims to make a comparative investigation into "Cao" metaphor and "Grass" metaphor with conceptual metaphor theory and mapping theory as theoretical foundation. Reasons for similarities and differences are analyzed in line with their metaphorical meanings.This thesis mainly consists of three parts. It firstly summarizes previous studies of metaphor and introspects researches of "Cao" metaphor and "Grass" metaphor, achieving background of topic selection. Secondly, it takes conceptual metaphor, mapping theory and cognitive mechanism of metaphor as theoretical basis. This part sets powerful theoretical foundation for following comparative analysis. Part three is the main body of this thesis. By collecting corpora, analyzing collected corpora and quoting plenty of literary works, the writer has grouped "Cao" metaphor and "Grass" metaphor into four categories in accordance with growth place, shape, function, and life status. Similarities and differences of "Cao" metaphor and "Grass" metaphor are also obtained in this part. Recognized similarities are due to human beings’ mutual experience model and cognitive pattern, which verifies Lakoff & Johnson’s opinions on the experience nature of metaphor. However, as what Lakoff & Johnson have said, "...every experience takes place within a vast background of cultural presupposition...It would be more correct to say that all experience is cultural through and through, that we experience our "world" in such a way that our culture is already present in the very experience itself." (1980:58) Different historical background, cultural tradition, and mode of thoughts will in turn act on our experience, causing the differences of metaphorical meanings.This thesis makes a comparative investigation into "Cao" metaphor and "Grass" metaphor from cognitive linguistic perspective. It to a certain extent supports the view of metaphor in cognitive linguistics and reveals the importance of cross-language and cross-culture study. Taking "Cao" and "Grass" as new research objects, this thesis broadens the scope of previous researches, enriches plant metaphor or even cognitive metaphor, and facilitates further understanding of the inseparable ties between culture and language. Furthermore, it offers referential experience for aspects like language teaching, language translation and cross-cultural communication.