A Cognitive Approach To Death Metaphors In English And Chinese

Death metaphors have particular expressions of euphemisms in different language communities, where they are influenced culturally and individually. What are the similarities and differences in English and Chinese death metaphors which embody the different values? What kinds of values and culture contribute to the expressions of English and Chinese death metaphors? In the cross-culture perspective on death metaphors, the author attempts to look at the above points by analyzing their functions, source domain images and the systematicity. This paper explores both the English and Chinese cultural elements which affect the thinking patterns about death metaphors of English and Chinese people.The paper consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the research. Chapter 2 reviews the background of metaphor studies where the view of substitution, the view of comparison, the view of interaction, the view of mapping and the view of conceptual blending are briefly discussed. Chapter 3 sets up the theoretical framework underlying the cognitive linguistic approach to metaphor, where the cognitive linguistics is briefly reviewed and the experiential basis, working mechanism, characteristics and classification of metaphor are introduced. And an account of previous studies adopting the cognitive approach to death metaphors is also given in the last section of this chapter. Chapter 4 is the main part of the whole where a detailed, comparative analysis of death metaphors in English and Chinese is presented. Chapter 5 explores the cultural universality and diversity of death metaphors in English and Chinese. Chapter 6 draws conclusion out of the above findings and meanwhile the limitation of the present study and recommendations for future research are addressed.Finally the author finds out that:(1) The expressions of both English and Chinese death metaphors are systematic. Though some of the source domains are different, they share a great deal of similarities, and the expressions of death metaphors bear their own features. (2) Because of the common understanding about the human experience and outside world, some metaphors are quite similar in the two language settings, which indicate that the cultural coherence is embodied by English death metaphors and also Chinese ones. (3)The differences in the culture, the value and the outlook about "death" contribute to the differences in death metaphors, and in turn, these differences reflect the different understandings of "death". Through this research, the author provides the study of death metaphors with a lot of proofs, which could hopefully enrich the study on the metaphor of "death" from the cognitive perspective. Besides, the author expects a better understanding of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, death metaphors, different values about "death" and, to some degree, to be helpful to instruct the research of Chinese and English languages and cross-cultural communication.