A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Emotional Concepts From The Perspective Of Metaphor And Metonymy

Traditionally,most linguistics viewed the metaphor as a figure of speech that is decorative in nature.Since the publication of Lakoff & Johnson’s(1980)work Metaphor We Live By,the study of metaphor from a cognitive perspective has thrived.They hold that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life,not just in language,especially in thought and action.And people use metaphors to understand the abstract concept and perform abstract reasoning.As the main cognitive way of thinking,metaphor and metonymy often interact with each other.The interaction between metaphor and metonymy in one linguistic expression is just like the two sides of a coin.So in order to study or analyze an abstract concept,the researchers should combine the metaphor and metonymy.Emotions play an important and essential role in human social and mental life.While the emotion concept is abstract and intangible,so it is hard to understand.People often use concrete and easy ways to construct the emotion concept,so metaphor and metonymy play a necessary role here.In the past few decades,numerous studies have been conducted on the contribution of metaphors and metonymy to the construction of emotion concepts.However,most linguistics pay more attention to the metaphor and the study of metonymy in emotion has not got enough attention.The paper combines the metaphor and the metonymy to contrast the emotion in Chinese and English.The questions are the followings:(1)What are the characteristics and differences of anger metaphor in Chinese and English?(2)What are the differences and relations in the formation of anger metaphor and anger metonymy?(3)What are the causes of the differences and relations anger metaphor and anger metonymy?This thesis uses a corpus-based approach and a comparative study to examine the anger in Chinese and English.The thesis searched all the anger terms from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and Center for Chinese Linguistics respectively.Through the contrastive analysis of these 480 sentences,this paper explores the similarities and differences between English and Chinese in the construction of emotion concepts,and the relationship between metaphor and metonymy in the construction of emotional concepts.It is found that there are many similarities and differences between English and Chinese in the expression of emotion.Both Chinese and English use containers,heat,color,directions to describe emotions,but there are differences in the specific content and frequency of use.Some of these similarities and differences are caused by the common physiological reactions of people,some are caused by cultural differences.Metaphor and metonymy are equally important in constructing the concept of emotion and even metonymy often plays a fundamental role.This study is of great significance to second language teaching and cross-cultural communication.In second language teaching and learning,students and teachers should pay more attention to these differences in order to better master a language.In the process of cross-cultural communication,language users should pay attention to metaphor and metonymy in their emotions so as to communicate better and avoid trouble caused by cultural differences.