A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study Of Metaphors Of "Marriage" In English And Chinese

More than two thousand years ago,Aristotle made a systematic discussion on metaphor from the perspective of rhetoric in his Poetics,that metaphor was a kind of decoration in language.Such proposition had been in the highest flight for a long time in relevant metaphor research;Until 1980,Lackoff and Johnson first put metaphors in daily communication under cognitive linguistics in their book Metaphors We Live By,in which they called such language usage conceptual metaphor.They believed that conceptual metaphor is a process of perceiving,experiencing and expressing one kind of abstract and intangible concepts through another kind which are more concrete and familiar,and its working mechanism is based on the mapping of similarity from source domain to target domain.From this point of view,metaphor exists universally in people’s language and life.Rather than a rhetorical phenomenon,it is a cognitive mechanism based on physical experience which serves as an approach to thinking as well as a powerful tool for people to understand the world.Since then,the study of metaphor has entered a new stage.Among numerous social relationships,marriage,as a special one of the countless connections between people and the surrounding environment,is regarded as the most common relationship in human society and has been attached great importance by many scholars.Through various researches,it is found that with the development and progress of human history,people’s understanding of marriage and the social status of the two parties included is constantly changing,during which period many images and metaphors about “marriage” are derived from the language.At the same time,the cognition and expression of "marriage" in different regions have both individuality and commonness.Based on this research background,with the support of large amounts of data in the three corpora of BNC,COCA and BCC,this thesis aims to study the source domain and working mechanism of conceptual metaphor of marriage in Chinese and English on the basis of previous researches on conceptual metaphor and marriage.Lackoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory will be applied to analyze linguistic expressions of “marriage” conceptual metaphor,while quantitative and qualitative analysis methods are used to compare these phenomena in both Chinese and English,so as to find out the similarities and differences between these two languages and the possible causes.Through the comparison and analysis of collected data,the author has made the following findings: 1.Both Chinese and English have had many metaphorical expressions related to marriage;According to the statistical results,the conceptual metaphor expressions about marriage have been more commonly used in Chinese than in English.2.The conceptual metaphor of marriage as an entity has occupied a very high proportion in the two languages,reaching more than 90%;Meanwhile,there have been a total of 23 common metaphorical source domains of marriage in Chinese and English,but the frequency is different.Moreover,there have been two unique source domains of Chinese,namely “marriage is tea” and “marriage is overlap relationship”.3.The similarities between Chinese and English conceptual metaphors of marriage have attributed to the inherent attributes of marriage,the common experience of human beings and the similar historical development process and social development stage of different countries,while the differences have stemmed from the influence of cultural variation,economic and political systems,geographical environment,and thinking patterns.This thesis has certain theoretical and practical significance.On the one hand,this study fills the gap in the research of marriage metaphor,which combines qualitative and quantitative methods,and helps people to further understand the nature of marriage metaphor.On the other hand,as a contrast study of cross-cultural metaphor,this thesis explores the relationship between different languages and cultures by comparing and analyzing the similarities and differences in language expression,which has certain reference and enlightenment for translation and cross-cultural communication.At the same time,as divorce rates continue to rise around the world,research on people’s perceptions of marriage can also try to explain this phenomenon at a linguistic level.