A Study Of Conceptual Metaphors Of Morality In Chinese

Traditional metaphor theories regard metaphor as a special rhetorical device. Conceptual metaphor theory put forward by Lakoff and Johnson marks the completion of the cognitive turn in metaphorology. According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor is pervasive in our daily life. It is not merely a rhetorical device but also an instrument of thinking and cognition. The essence of metaphor is to understand unfamiliar and abstract things in terms of concrete and familiar things. Therefore, when discussing the abstract concept morality, people make use of metaphors.Moral is an abstract concept. In recent years, the research on morality from the perspective of metaphor has become a new approach. Moral psychologists focus on the dimensions, regulations of moral metaphors as well as the impacts of moral metaphors on moral judgments. They point out that moral metaphors include vertical spatial metaphors, color metaphors, clean metaphors and thermal metaphors. Physical sensorimotor experience and psychological experience share the same neural basis. Lakoff(1996, 2002), Johnson(1993) and Yu(2015) studied it from the perspective of language. However, the previous studies concentrate on moral metaphors in English, visual moral metaphors, few researches are involved in moral metaphors in Chinese.In view of these factors, this thesis studies the moral metaphors in Chinese from cognitive linguistic perspective. There are two research questions:(1) how do people conceptualize morality and immorality?(2) What is the experiential basis of moral metaphors? The thesis finds that when discussing morality, people use familiar, concrete things in other domains to understand morality. Moral is pure, light, white, beautiful, high, healthy, whole, bounded and balanced, while immoral is impure, black, dark, ugly, low, diseased, degenerated, deviant and unbalanced. The moral metaphors in Chinese are grounded in forms of well-being. The dimensions of “well-beings” are based on our embodied experience. The working mechanism of moral metaphor is the mapping from our psychological feelings of the objects’ attributes onto the morality domain. Each metaphorical moral scheme has a logic and gives structures to abstract moral thought. Sometimes metaphorical moral schemes lead to many moral stereotypes. Only if we know how the stereotypes come about, we can override them.This thesis makes a study on moral metaphors in Chinese from cognitive linguistic perspective. It is to a certain extent supports the view of metaphor in cognitive linguistics. Taking morality as a new research object, this thesis broadens the scope of previous researches and enriches moral metaphor or even cognitive metaphor. This thesis hopes to deepen people’s understanding of morality and offer useful guides for foreign-oriented Chinese teaching.