A Contrastive Study On Metaphor Of Plant Vocabulary Between Vietnamese And Chinese

Metaphor is a cognitive way of thinking in which people understand and experience one kind of thing in term of another. Metaphor is rooted in various ethnic cultures and manifests itself in people’s languages and thoughts. The major concern of this study is put on the plant metaphor, especially words that convey plant metaphorization in both writing and daily oral communication.The formation of plant metaphor is built on the basis of people’s growing understanding and experience of plants’ growth habit, its organic features, functions, shapes, and locations. This learning process is bidirectional. On one hand, the features of plats are projected to the objective conceptual domain of human beings or other things. On the other hand, some concepts of plants may be projected to the botanic domain, or mapping within the botanic domain. People cognize or understand some concepts by acquiring knowledge of the form and characteristics of a certain plants. Likewise, they fell and name this world of plants by understanding some concepts. People habitat the planet of earth and there is universality in their understanding and experience of plants of the same species. However, their understanding of the plants varies as people of different nations have their distinct cultural traditions, religious beliefs, esthetic values and geographical conditions. Thus plant metaphors in different languages bear marks of its unique way of thinking and cultural connotation. The current researches on plant metaphor mainly focus on plant metaphor in Chinese and a comparative study of plant metaphor in English and Chinese. The major conclusions so far fall into the differences of western and Chinese cultures. However, research done about plant metaphors in the same cultural circle is rare to be found. This thesis provides a comprehensive and systematic comparison of plant metaphor in Vietnamese and Chinese. By a careful observation and analysis of words used in plant metaphors in Chinese and Vietnamese, the research states clearly the formation and mapping relations of plant metaphor such as reflection from botanic domain to non-botanic domain or vice versa and mapping within the botanic domain. It aims at revealing the differences and similarities of metaphorical mapping in the two languages and analyzing possible reasons that have caused the cognitive differences.Under the guidance of the theories of conceptual metaphor, the thesis lists a full-scale quantitative statistics of Vietnamese and Chinese words used in plant metaphor. Words that have more than three metaphorical meanings and high frequency in utilization are picked out for further analysis and comparison. The research studies the meaning transferring mechanism from its original meaning to metaphorical meanings and the grammar of nouns in plant metaphor. The mapping mode of the plant metaphor in Chinese and Vietnamese include reflections from botanic domain to non-botanic domain or vice versa and mapping within the botanic domains. The thesis points out factors that contribute to the similarities and differences of plant metaphors in Chinese and Vietnamese from both cognitive and cultural angles.The first chapter is introduction to the background, targets, studying methods, contents, and discoveries of the research.The second chapter sets up the theoretical basis of the research. This part introduces the nature of metaphor, the mechanism of conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, and the relations between metaphor and culture. It also briefly states the properties of source field of plants and how the source field and the target field correspond with each other.The third chapter focuses on the classification of words concerning plant metaphor in Chinese and Vietnamese. The classification is done under principles of general biology, to be specific, the traits of plants and the law of its development. Plants are classified into five major categories, namely, words about the plants organs, words about the nature and features of plants, words about the growth of plants, and words describing the growth of plants under the influence of human beings. All these words are drawn from the following four dictionaries:Great Dictionary of Vietnamese, Great Dictionary of Chinese, Modern Chinese Dictionary, and Classified Chinese Dictionary. Words in every category are counted and examined and the thesis provides a definite number of the words that have metaphorical meaning and also gives the proportion of this kind of words in the whole word systems of the two languages.The fourth chapter is a comparative study of the semantics of words concerning plants. In the light of cognitive semantics, this part studies the connotation of words used in plant metaphor, including the semantic classification, polysemy, metaphorical meaning, and metonymic transferring meaning. Observation shows that polysemy exists widely among words about plants in both Chinese and Vietnamese. Those words have original as well as extended meanings. Metaphor and metonymy are two basic ways of extending the meaning of words and transferring to another species or categories. Analogy of the metaphorical meaning is mainly achieved through analogy in its shape, location, function, properties and features. The two major approaches of achieving this purpose include transference from the whole to some parts or a certain part, and from plants themselves to the products made of plants. Besides, the research shows that in both Chinese and Vietnamese meaning transference occurs less frequent in nouns concerning plants’reproducing function than in nouns about nutritious function.The fifth chapter is a comparative study of the metonymy of words concerning plants. According to cognitive linguistics, metonymy and metaphor are both common ways of thinking of human beings. The research starts from the nominatum of nouns concerning plants and its transference in different categories, aiming to reveal its cognitive motivation. By carful analyzing and elaboration, we can see nouns concerning plants in both Chinese and Vietnamese can transfer its part of speech from nouns to adjectives, verbs or quantifiers. The author points out that this phenomenon shows the relation between things. Transferring nouns that denotes things into verbs that represents relations shows that things are conceived by its relations through metonymy. The transference of the nouns of plants’ names into adjectives can be considered as a metaphor that expresses the nature of things. The transference of the nouns into quantifiers refer to the quantity of nouns by highlighting the nature of things through the "physical shape and form" of the organs of plants. The phenomenon of transferring plants’ names which are originally nouns into other part of speech is rare, but non-correspondent transference of parts of speech outnumbers correspondent transference of parts of speech, which suggests that plant metaphor is deeply influenced by national cultures.The sixth chapter is about the comparison of words used in plant metaphor. Starting from the theory of conceptual metaphor, the author analyzes and compares the mechanisms and types of Vietnamese and Chinese plant metaphor, and we find that nouns used in plant metaphor has the greatest number and these words bear the same cognitive thinking, which shows that Vietnamese and Chinese are alike in the way of cognizing the objective world. The metaphorical mapping of Chinese and Vietnamese plant words is bi-directional-plants can be used for both the source domain and the target domain. Vietnamese and Chinese people not only map plants to the appearance, personality, virtues, behavior and actions, emotions and different kinds of human beings, but also map plants to the shape of things, nature, military, medicine, art, and other abstract concepts. In addition, Vietnamese and Chinese people conversely map their understanding of themselves, their experience of animals and other external things to plants, for instance, projecting their body parts, animals and specific things onto plants. The sense of time of both Vietnamese and Chinese people is cyclic-considering time as the cycling of four seasons. People feel the four seasons by the change of farming activities and their corresponding times. They perceive the size, height of other things and phenomenon according to the sprouting, budding, blossoming, withering, and other botanical activities. The plant metaphorical mapping in Chinese and Vietnamese can be totally correspondent, partially correspondent, non-correspondent or vacant in correspondence. Generally speaking, there are very few, if any, differences between Vietnamese and Chinese plant metaphors. The difference manifests itself mainly in the association of plants, cognition, and choices of metaphorical objectsThe final chapter provides a review of the content of the research. It summarizes the thesis’ findings and contributions and also analyzes the limitations of the research and points out the way for further study.