A Comparative Study Of Body Metaphors In Chinese And Japanese Idioms

Metaphor is not only a rhetorical device,but also a cognitive way.As a common linguistic phenomenon,it contains deeper cultural connotations.In recent years,with the development of cognitive linguistics,more and more researches have been done on metaphor.As one of the starting points of human cognition,human organs are an important source of many language words.Therefore,the metaphor behind many human body words has gradually become the focus of many scholars.There are a lot of idioms containing human organs in both Chinese and Japanese.They are born from People’s life experience and cognitive experience for a long time,to a certain extent,it represents the thinking and cognitive habits of different groups of chinese-speaking and japanese-speaking people and the group cultural background of the users.Therefore,the understanding of language representation must go through more complicated thinking judgment and corresponding cultural interpretation.In this thesis,the human body idioms in chinese-japanese bilinguals are investigated from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,and two dictionaries of Chinese idioms(CIHAI edition)and Japanese idioms are used as corpus,based on Lakoff’s and Johnson’s theories of metaphor,this paper makes a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences of metaphor in Chinese and Japanese body idioms.This article is divided into the following six parts:The first part is the concrete distribution of human organs in the original domain of Chinese and Japanese idioms.Based on the collected corpus,this paper divides them into 16 idiomatic expressions of human body parts,and analyzes the structure,quantity and expression of human body metaphor in Chinese and Japanese idiomatic expressions.The second part is the analysis of the types of the target domain in Chinese and Japanese idioms.The types of the target domain are simply classified from eight main aspects: emotion,attitude,sex,moral character,state/situation,result,method and ability.The third part is the concrete analysis of the projection path of body metaphor in Chinese and Japanese idioms.This paper analyzes the projection path of Chinese and Japanese body metaphors from the body domain to the non-body domain,and through five specific projection ways: organ function,organ position,organ state,performing to organs and combining with other specific domains,focus on the case where the target domain is a specific domain.This paper makes a cross-sectional analysis of the projection path of body metaphor in Chinese and Japanese idioms.The fourth part is the vertical comparison of the metaphorical projection model of human body in Chinese and Japanese idioms.This paper discusses three parts: “The correspondence of projection model,the partial correspondence of projection model and the non-correspondence of projection model”,and analyzes the language and culture of China and Japan on the basis of commonness through the comparison of projection model,and what personality traits are there.Based on the examples,analysis and comparison of the first three chapters,the fifth part summarizes the characteristics of Chinese and Japanese idioms in body metaphor projection mechanism.Specifically: Chinese “Multi-location of source domain”and “Secondary projection phenomenon”,and Japanese “High semantic distortion value”and “Pay attention to inner feelings”characteristics.The sixth part briefly analyzes the main reasons of the similarities and differences in body metaphor projection of Chinese and Japanese idioms from three aspects:linguistic morphology,geography and culture.To sum up,this paper makes a detailed and careful comparative study of the phenomenon of body metaphor in Chinese and Japanese idioms from the cognitive perspective,to further strengthen the understanding and expression of idiomatic expressions in actual use,and to try to gain a little in the field of the study of body metaphor of Chinese and Japanese idiomatic expressions,and at the same time to provide some practical help for bilingual users and learners...