A Contrastive Study Of Love Metaphors In English And Chinese

The role of metaphor has gained fresh respect since the rise of cognitive linguistics in the last twenty years challenged the conventional understanding.Metaphor is recognized as a crucial cognitive tool that can assist with comprehending the world more than just as a figure of speech.Metaphors are not only expressed through language,but also serve as a way of thinking and behaving that is shaped by cultural beliefs and values.Therefore,it is of great research significance to explore the formation and development of conceptual metaphor through the study of everyday language.Emotion has continuously been the primary concern of cognitive linguistics as the most universal and significant life experience.Love is one of the essential emotions.The concept of love is usually abstract,so people often use metaphors unconsciously to express it.The emergence of the cognitive linguistics has opened up a new viewpoint for examining metaphors and was conductive to the study of emotional metaphors.The similarities and differences between love conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English were examined in this article,from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,combining with corpus retrieval and sampling results.Besides,the author further elaborated the cognitive and cultural reasons for the differences and similarities.The study found that many of the same“love”metaphors are used in both English and Chinese,such as LOVE IS WAR,LOVE IS JOURNEY and LOVE IS FIRE.This suggests that the English and Chinese“love”metaphors both stem from life experience and have the same psychological and physiological basis.At the same time,English and Chinese have their own unique conceptual metaphor of“love”.In English,there are such conceptual metaphors as LOVE IS A COMMOCIAL EXCHANGE and LOVE IS FOOD.In Chinese,there are such conceptual metaphor as“爱是丝绸”,“爱是缘分”.This results showed how varied cultural backgrounds and social practices influenced the conceptual metaphor of“love”,highlighted cultural differences and traits of national culture.This thesis discusses the metaphor of “love” from a cognitive perspective.Based on a large number of contrasts between English and Chinese,the contemporary metaphor theory,could be further confirmed and developed from the perspective of Chinese.This thesis contrasted the conceptual metaphors of “love” in English and Chinese from the perspectives of living environment,religion difference and aesthetic difference,to some extent,is useful in overcoming language barriers in cross-culture communication.