A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study Of The Metaphorical Extensions Of In In English And LI(里) In Chinese

The study of metaphor can be traced back to Aristotle. For centuries in the field of literature and rhetoric, metaphor has been mostly considered only as a figure of speech.The contemporary study of metaphor within cognitive linguistics posits that instead of only being a language phenomenon, metaphor is a cognitive mechanism for our perception of the world. Adopting the cognitive approach to metaphor, this study follows the analytic framework of Lan (2000,2002,2003) in carrying out a contrastive analysis of the English concept IN and its Chinese counterpart LI as encoded by the English preposition in and its Chinese counterpart li respectively. Corpora data from three corpora, i.e. British National Corpus, Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese and Babel Parallel Corpus, are collected and analyzed.The study has found out that:(1) Both concepts under investigation are heavily used metaphorically, mapping the CONTAINER schema to the same six target domains, namely, TIME, EVENT, SITUATION, ENTITY, VIRTUAL SPACE, and PROFESSION.(2) Remarkable consistency has been detected in the prototypical models and metaphorical extensions of IN and LI.(3) The discrepancies between IN and LI lie in three aspects:first, the differences of metaphorical extensions are in SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP and MANNER. Second, IN in English is more metaphorically used than LI in Chinese; the last is that there is a discrepancy in the proportions of in-li correspondence and li-in correspondence.The findings of the study provide evidence for the claim that by mapping the image schema structure of space onto abstract domains, metaphor is a kind of the cognitive mechanisms that assist our perception of the abstract concepts and also give support to the assumption that the CONTAINER schema is shared between English and Chinese. The study also casts light on English and Chinese teaching and learning.