A Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese And Japanese Human Body Words Emotion Metaphors

Human body part terms are the most fundamental vocabularies of all thelanguages in the world, while human body metaphor is one of the most commonlyused mode of thinking. The mankind’s cognitive process of the world is by knowingourselves first and using ourselves as a yardstick of the world. Thus, emotionalcognition and expression is no exception.The human’s emotional cognition is originated from the body experience.Therefore, though living in different nations and cultures, people still have commonemotional metaphor for the human body. In the meantime, different nation’s languages,cultures, history and customs affect people’s emotional cognition experience, so thereare also differences in human body metaphors of people from different nationalitiesand cultures. So, is it possible to find the similarities and differences of humanemotion metaphor in Chinese and Japanese languages from the human emotionmetaphors in human body similarities and cultural differences? If possible, in thespecific Chinese and Japanese languages, what are the similarities and differences inboth emotional human metaphors? What is the reason for that?To answer these questions, through a combination of theory and research incognitive linguistics, psychology, lexicology and other related disciplines, this papermainly adopts comparative research method, description and explanation combinationmethod, qualitative and quantitative combination method, carrying out thecomparative study on Chinese and Japanese human body emotional metaphor. Itlocates metaphorical expressions and human emotion-related terms from the Chineseand Japanese language dictionaries and corpora. Not only includes the phrases, idioms,it also includes the idiomatic expression without fixed structure.In this study, it includes four chapters: the first chapter is an introduction, whichintroduces the selection of topic, purpose and significance of the study, literaturereview of related research, and research objectives and methods. The second chapterintroduces the definition of emotion and physiological basis, then followed by a comparison of metaphor selection of "happiness, anger, sadness and fear" in Chineseand Japanese, it analyzes the reasons for the differences. Based on the chapter two,chapter three carries out further analysis on similarities and differences of emotionalmetaphors of human body terms in Chinese and Japanese language, including theunderstanding of metaphor mechanism, comparison of metaphorical objects selectionand constitution. The fourth chapter is the conclusion, through comparative analysisof cognitive linguistics and lexicology, it reaches the conclusions: physiologicalsimilarities of human emotion changes, and impacts from Chinese characters andculture upon Japan are the reasons for the similarities of Chinese and Japanese humanbody nouns emotion metaphors. And certain parts of human body homographs, thedifferences from the perspectives of emotional metaphor selection，different emotionexpression and recognition have also led to differences in human body emotionmetaphor of two countries. It is of certain significance to studies on Chinese andJapanese translation, teaching, cross-cultural communication.