The Study Of Conceptual Metaphors Of “Oil” In Chinese

Metaphor is not only a means of rhetoric but also a thinking model and a basic tool of human beings to know the world. Chinese is one of the most important parts of Chinese culture. In the process of Chinese Culture, Chinese succeeded in absorbing new elements to enrich language system, so more and more metaphors derived from Chinese culture correspondingly. Because of the lag behind western countries in the process of scientific and technological civilization, people develop the habit of cherishing the gifts of nature and appreciating natural resources in the development of Chinese. Therefore, it brings lots of metaphors about natural resources in our daily life. Compared with previous studies that paid more attention to metaphors about water and mountain, oil is also a very important resource, and metaphors of “oil” in Chinese also widely exist, but seldom analyzed conceptual metaphors of “oil” in Chinese. So this thesis will investigate “oil” metaphors in Chinese in the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to help people to have a better understanding of the “oil” metaphors in Chinese, and will try to explore the following issues:(1) The representation of “oil” metaphors;(2) The forming mechanism and mapping procedure of “oil” metaphors;(3) The cognitive functions revealed by “oil” metaphors.The data adopted in this study mainly come from the Modern Chinese Corpus developed by Center for Chinese Linguistics Peking University, Modern Chinese Dictionary, and The Great Chinese Dictionary. The paper is divided into five parts. The first part mainly introduces research background, purpose and significance of the study, methodology, and organization of the thesis. The second part is literature review. In this part, we will introduce previous studies of metaphor abroad and at home, and the previous studies of metaphors concerning oil. Because we will analyze the conceptual metaphors of “oil” in Chinese, the thesis tries to build the theoretical framework in the third part. It contains the classifications and characteristics of conceptual metaphor, and the working mechanism of conceptual metaphor. The next part is the core part of the thesis. By collecting corpora, analyzing collected corpora and quoting plenty of literary works, this part analyzes the “oil” metaphors in Chinese. The last part is the conclusion, which contains the thesis’ s major findings and implications.After identifying, analyzing and classifying, there are seven categories of “oil” metaphors in Chinese: MONEY IS OIL, CATALYZER IS OIL, ENERGY IS OIL, TIME IS OIL, BRIGHTNESS IS OIL, CUNNING IS OIL, and HUMAN BEINGS ARE OIL. The findings indicate that the metaphorical mapping and the semantic extension of these conceptual metaphors are based on the perception and embodiment of people on oil, which form from Chinese culture. In addition, the “oil” metaphors in Chinese are of systematicity and generalticity. These “oil” metaphors in Chinese reflect cognitive function of metaphor---facilitating the understanding of abstract concepts, generating new knowledge and creating new perspective to view things.