| Metaphor is generally considered to be a mode of thinking and a way of cognition.Love,as an important emotion,contains rich conceptual content which tends to be metaphorically expressed.And proverbs,usually as metaphorical expressions,provide linguistic materials for sharing our understandings of love in delicate ways.This thesis collected 200 effective love proverbs as data for analysis from authoritative full-length English-Chinese Dictionaries of Proverbs.The thesis aims to compare the Chinese and English love proverbs from the view of conceptual metaphor in cognitive linguistics.It attempts to answer the three questions as follows:1)How many types of conceptual metaphors of love are commonly employed in Chinese and English proverbs?2)What are the similarities and differences in the metaphorical expressions of love between Chinese and English proverbs?3)What will be cognitive motivations behind these similarities and differences?This thesis finds out that the similarities consist in that love is conceptualized as journey,war,a unity of two,fluid and organ in both Chinese and English proverbs.The differences reveal that love is conceptualized as a two inseparable object,agricultural product and agricultural life,and predestined relationship in Chinese,whereas love is conceptualized as fire,economic exchange and appetizing food in English.It also finds out that the motivation for the similar conceptualizations underlying Chinese and English love proverbs is due to the fact that two ethnic groups share the same material embodiment.In contrast,what behind the differences is mainly due to the shaping of cultural,social,and living contexts.This thesis proves that metaphors share similarities in physiological and behavioral processes and demonstrate differences in different languages which are influenced by the diversity of cultures and that metaphor roots in the shared experience of human beings and changes by the specific cultural background. |
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