A Contrastive Study Of The Linguistic Expression Of Emotions Between English And Chinese

Emotions are at the center of human mental and social life. People experience emotions in both physical and psychological spheres. Furthermore, people are not only able to feel emotions (psychologically) but also to express emotions. The expression of emotions can be done either non-verbally (by a quickened pulse rate, flushed cheeks, more pronounced and energetic gestures, and so on) or verbally, i.e. speaking of emotions (by means of linguistic expressions). Naturally, the three human abilities in terms of emotions lead to three research fields, namely the psychological activities of a person in a particular emotional state, his or her physiological and behavioural accompaniments, and the language used to talk about the emotion. Admittedly, emotions are not themselves linguistic things but the most readily available nonphenomenal access we have to them is through language. Therefore, the most important methodological issue in the study of emotions is language, for the ways people talk give us access to folk descriptions of the emotions. In recent years, cognitive linguistics has abandoned the idea that being a figure of speech, metaphor is a set of extraordinary or figurative linguistic expressions whose meaning is reducible to some set of literal propositions. Instead, many scholars now hold that metaphors are cognitive processes that help to create and maintain people's view of culture and play a significant role in their capacity to conceive emotions. The analysis of emotional metaphors in the English language has become a well-developed field of study and continues to expand. In the past two decades, extensive studies have been conducted by cognitive linguists on the function of metaphor and metonymy in the conceptualization of emotions in English. All the studies are characterized by the fact that they illustrate how figurative language plays a pivotal role in understanding a phenomenon as complex as the nature of human emotion by providing a comprehensive or selective analysis of conceptual metaphors or metonymies in the English language. However, claims of the universality of the metaphorical/metonymical conceptualization of emotion cannot be validated ifintensive research is not conducted in other important languages such as Chinese. The present dissertation attempts to further cross-cultural studies in cognitive linguistics by examining and categorizing the use of certain emotion metaphors and metonymies in Chinese as against those in English. The contents of this dissertation have been organized into seven chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the background, objective and database of the present study as well as the general framework of the dissertation. Chapter 2 is devoted to reviewing the studies of emotional meaning, as we believe that only after we have a clear idea of the merits and demerits of the various theories in the study of emotional language can we propose a better approach to the study. That approach is elucidated in chapter 3 - theoretical framework and methodology. Chapters 4 and 5 constitute the main body of the dissertation. In chapter 4, we propose a three-stage folk model, on the basis of which, the structures of Chinese and English emotional expressions are compared. This structural comparison reveals that Chinese is more iconic than English in the expression of emotions. Chapter 5 addresses the differences and similarities of the content of emotional expressions between the two languages. In the chapter, the comparison is drawn both diachronically and synchronically. It is found that in both English and Chinese, emotions are largely conceptualized and expressed in metaphorical and metonymical terms. On the one hand, both English and Chinese follow the same metonymical principle: they talk about emotions by describing the physiological, psychological or behavioural responses of the emotions. The two languages share some central conceptual metaphors in the conceptualization of emotions and these metaphors can be reduced to an overarching master metaphor - EMOTI...