| Human Body Part Terms are the most fundamental vocabularies of all the languages in the world, while Human Body Metaphor is one of the most commonly used mode of thinking. The mankind's cognitive process of the world is by knowing ourselves first and using ourselves as a yardstick of the world. In this sense, the development of the human language starts from our own. Our cognition of the external world is through our own experience and we thus name them and describe them using personification. Vice versa, the cognition of ourselves is formed according to our knowledge of the external world. We name and describe our body parts and organs by them. These body metaphors and their achievement are the most basic ones in the whole concept of body metaphor.The human's cognitive activity origins from the body experience. On one hand, the experience of different ethnic groups can be the same, thus we can hypothesize that the system of the Human Body Metaphor Concept is universal. On the other hand, the diversity of the cultural background would influence people's cognitive experience, which leads to the possible result that there are some differences in the system of the Human Body Metaphor Concept with different cultures. The problem is that to what extend would the language culture affect the system of the Human Body Metaphor concept. This essay tries to answer the question by looking into the comparison between Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body Part Terms.Based on the comprehensive application of the theory and also the research findings of the disciplines such as lexicology, semantics, cognitive linguistics and psychology, this study mainly uses the methods of compare and contrast, description and explanation, and qualitative and quantitative analysis. This essay will discuss Human Body Part Terms thoroughly in the following seven chapters.Chapter 1 IntroductionThis chapter introduces the universal existence of Human Body Metaphor in each language. The thoughts of human beings have an embodied characteristic, that is to say, the human body and its organs are the basis and one of the starting points of human's cognitive activity. Human beings tend to map the results of self-cognition to the understanding of other objects and concepts. Protagoras, the philosopher of ancient Greek, once said:Man is the measure of all things. Therefore, there are many examples in different languages that would use human body part as a yardstick of the world firstly, then map it to other objects, whether it's a concrete one or not. This chapter reviews the research findings concerning about the human body metaphor home and abroad. Foreign studies focus on the aspects such as the semantic analysis of Human Body Metaphor, the cultural aspect of Human Body Part Terms and the study of them in an anthropologic perspective and so on. Domestic studies mainly stay in the linguistic level. They try to verify cognitive linguistic theory with the linguistic knowledge. Generally speaking, there are a growing number of studies about Human Body Part Terms, but there are also some weak points. The results about the specified semantic studies of Human Body Part Terms currently are not enough; the studies focus too much on the cognitive mechanism, especially metaphor; there's also a lack of profound demonstration about the semantic features of Human Body Part Terms; and, there's a shortage of inter-language research. Thus, we choose the comparison of Human Body Part Terms between Chinese and Vietnamese as the main part, and also with the comparison of English, we try to give a further explanation and description of Human Body Metaphor by studying the semantic situation of the Human Body Part Terms in different languages from many aspects, analyzing the metaphorical basis and cultural elements of its formation and development, comparing the metaphorical mechanism and the patterns between Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body Part Terms under different cultural background and, comparing and contrasting Spatial Metaphor, Container Metaphor and Time Metaphor.Chapter 2 Basic Theory of MetaphorMetaphor has always been treated as a way to modify the speech and it is an exceptional phenomenon, thus it has long been studied in the field of rhetoric. With the emergence of Cognitive Linguistics in the 1980s, many linguists began to treat metaphor more than a way of rhetoric, but also a cognitive method which is necessary for human beings to organize the conceptual system. This chapter aims to lay the theoretical foundation of this project. Also, it will establish the theoretical frame of the metaphor and the contrast between Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body Metaphor. This essay uses the theory of Conceptual Metaphor and some relative theories, such as the Mapping in the Domain, some similar association, the Image Schema, the theory of cognitive experience and so on. According to Lakoff's understanding, the metaphor in the language is only a superficial phenomenon, what really matters is the concept of metaphor that deeply exists in our conceptual system. Actually, not only do the Human Body Part Terms exist in a large scale, but also have they already formed a certain concept and a category, which is a metaphorical category, consists of Structural, Spatial and Ontological Metaphor. The stability of the Conceptual Metaphor makes the common metaphor a systematic, generative and brief one.In the cognitive process of metaphor in different ethnic groups which use different language, the directions of the Mapping between ontology and vehicle would be different due to the different concepts, different systems of meaning and values, and different modes of thinking. Therefore, extra emphasis is placed on the established Conceptual Metaphor. These differences showed in language lay a realistic philosophical foundation for the comparative study of the metaphor in different Human Body Part Terms of different languages.Chapter 3 Comparative Study of the Semantic Structure in Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body Part Terms The essence of metaphor is a kind of cognitive activity. The understanding process is actually a transformational one which transfers the vehicle's distinct semantic features into the ontology. The Human Body Part Terms reflect the transformational rules that nouns have on a semantic level, which makes the study of semantics really important. This chapter tries to have a comparative study of the Human Body Part Terms'semantic contents from a cognitive linguistic perspective, including the study of semantic category, the polymerization of polysemy in semantics, metaphor and metonymy in the word meaning.Semantics is the meaning of a language. The variability and stability of the word meaning make the meaning shift process have both similarities and differences. Only by a thorough analysis and description of the similarities and differences of the semantic features and by revealing the cognitive reasons that determine the meaning shift process and the profound semantic mechanism, can we have a full understanding of the semantic system, thus can we handle the word system well. According to our research findings, the Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body Part Terms both have the feature of polysemy, that is to say, there is an extended meaning besides its original meaning. Metaphor and metonymy are the basic ways to extend and transfer Human Body Part Terms. The metaphorical methods include the comparison of the shape, function and position; while the metonymic methods mainly include four metonymy related relationship:the part-whole relation, the relations between the organ and its movement, its function and its size. The meaning shift process of Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body Part Terms show a decreasing trend from the head to the body and from the limbs to the internal organs.Chapter 4 The Comparative Study of Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body MetonymyMetonymy, like metaphor, is not only a linguistic form but also a powerful cognitive tool for people's conceptualization of the world:"Metonymy allows us to conceptualize one thing by means of its relation to something else; metonymic concepts structure not just our language but our thoughts, attitudes, and actions; Metonymic concepts (like THE PART FOR THE WHOLE) are part of the ordinary, everyday way we think and act as well as talk." Lakoff (1980:37)The research findings show that there is a widespread existence of Human Body Part Terms transformation in both Chinese and Vietnamese. But the transformations in Chinese are more distinct, more plentiful and more active, especially in the cases of noun to verb, noun to adjective and noun to classifier.Chapter 5 The Comparative Study of Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body MetaphorThis chapter starts from the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and by comparing and contrasting the metaphor mechanism and type of Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body Part Terms, it reaches a conclusion that the generative process of cognition in Human Body Metaphor is very plentiful and these phenomena have similarities. This also shows a universal feature when people get to know the objective world on the other hand. The fundamental reason why Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body Metaphor are much alike is that they have the same cognitive method. Although different ethnic groups have different languages, people use the same method to know and understand all kinds of features, which has divided the understandings of different languages into some certain patterns. The Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body Metaphor are no exceptions. Both of them are based on the similarity. However, due to the speakers' different psychological situations, cultural backgrounds, and living standards, there are still some slight differences between them. Apart from the discussion about the metaphorical type and mechanism, we also classify and analyze the target of the metaphorical Mapping. People's cognitive process is from the known to the unknown, from the simple to the complicated and from the concrete to the abstract. Therefore, human beings constantly map the human body part to the external objects, and in the meanwhile, we also have improved our self-understandings, so that we in turn map our understandings of the external world to the human body. In this body-part Domain and non-body Domain Mapping process, human body can act as both Source Domain and Target Domain. The non-body Domain can not only be fauna and flora category, architectural category and container category, but also can be abstract ones, such as linguistic category, spatial category and emotional category.Chapter 6 the Comparative Study of Chinese and Vietnamese Human Body's Spatial, Container, Time and Emotional MetaphorThe space acts as the meta-concept in Cognitive Linguistics, it's a concept that is used to understand other concepts. (Lakoff &Johnson,1980:14) The core of Embodied Philosophy and Cognitive Linguistics is the formations of human's category, concept, reasoning and intelligence, while its basic form mainly depends on the perception of the body parts, spatial relations and strength exercise training and so on. This chapter will have a comprehensive study of Human Body Spatial Metaphor (including Orientational Metaphor, Container Metaphor and Time Metaphor. Then it will explore each metaphorical type cognitively and analyze their similarities and differences. A personal understanding of the asymmetry and mixture of the orientational words and also the grammatical phenomenon of Human Body Part Terms will be pointed out.Chapter 7 ConclusionThis chapter will summarize all the studies presented in this essay. This paper's major research findings, its innovation and the problems which need further exploration will also be included. |
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