A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Idioms About Sadness Emotion From Conceptual Metaphor And Metonymy Perspectives

Idioms are component parts of human’s daily life and used for their daily communication,which contain traditional culture and thought,so the formation of them has close relationship with a nation’s history,economy,geography,habits and mentality.In the meantime,emotions are formed on the basis of human’s universal experience,and also a focus for cognitive linguistics’ research.Emotions are abstract but can be expressed by linguistic symbols,which is in close contact with human cognition.Therefore,the thesis combines idioms and emotions,and comparatively analyzes Chinese-English idioms of sadness emotion.Because the previous studies on emotions are about happiness and anger emotions or about the whole basic emotion,and the study on sadness emotion is not detailed and comprehensive,the thesis firstly collects many idioms of sadness emotion in both Chinese and English,then based on the conceptual metaphor theory and the conceptual metonymy theory,the thesis analyzes and classifies those generating processes of those idioms,which aims to find the similarities of the metaphorical and metonymical processes of generating those Chinese and English idioms.What’s more,the thesis compares them and concludes their differences.In the end,the thesis sees from the above analysis and illustrates the causes of those similarities and differences.Through the inductive method,the thesis concludes the similar and different source domains which are used in the metaphorical processesand metonymical processes of generating Chinese-English idioms about sadness emotion,and finds that they are closely related with the human’s cognition and experience,so the two nations can use a lot of similar source domains to express the same “SADNESS” domain;in the meantime,because of the difference of their culture,the choices to source domains also show in different aspects.According to the similar and different source domains,the thesis also discusses about the similarities and differences of the mapping and projecting processes which happen when Chinese-English idioms of sadness emotion are produced based on metaphorical processes and metonymical processes,and finds that although some source domains in those metaphorical processes and metonymical processes are similar,they also have different mapping and projecting processes and therefore produce different idioms.And in the analytic process,the thesis applies the method that combines discussion with instances together to make the thesis more convincing.Based on the above analysis,the thesis illustrates the causes of similarities and differences and comes to the conclusion that in the process of second language acquisition,it will be helpful to understand the culture of their nation and learn their way of thinking.The metaphorical processes and metonymical processes of generating Chinese-English idioms about sadness emotion in this thesis is more detailed and concrete.Meanwhile the thesis also supplements the previous research about sadness emotion.and it owns reference value towards second language acquisition and the teaching about idioms aboutsadness emotion.