An Empirical Study On Conceptual Transfer Of Emotion In Chinese English Learners’ Narratives

This thesis aims to investigate the characteristics of Chinese learners’ English narratives on the aspect of emotion as well as the confirmation of conceptual transfer. The participants in this study were 60 English majors in Grade Two or Three from a certain university in Hebei Province. They were required to watch a silent video, then write down the descriptions of the story, especially two characters’ emotions, 30 in Chinese and 30 in English. All the emotions in the narratives were classified into three types, according to Martin and White’s proposal, which were affect as quality, affect as process and affect as comment, for further coding and discussion..Associated with the coding tool of BFSU Qualitative coder and the statistical of Log-likelihood caculator, the author found that, the interference of mother tongue took place in participants’ English narratives. In addition, conceptual transfer occurred in affect as process and affect as comment. In affect as process, participants’ overusing of ‘heart’ to portray the sad emotion implied that they still relied on the conceptual metaphor of native language to produce target language. While in affect as comment, there was nothing wrong with participants’ English expressions in linguistic level, but expressions related to it hardly showed their appearances in both Chinese and English narratives. It can be inferred that Chinese participants applied the thinking mode of native language to express emotion and successfully transformed it into target language during the production of target language. It verified the fact that conceptual transfer was different from semantic transfer at the same time. Besides, the author found, compared with the Chinese narratives, the English narratives were lack of variety and flexibility in vocabularies related to emotional expressions. And participants preferred to the strategy of replacing concrete words with their superordinate terms.In accordance with the above findings, the author offered two suggestions for further English teaching and learning. One is increasing the input of English vocabulary related to emotional expressions. The other is paying more attention to the cognitive differences of emotions between Chinese and English.