A Comparative Study Of Fear Metaphors In English And Chinese

Metaphor is the way we think, and it is a powerful cognitive tool for the conceptualization of abstract concepts, which is universal to every language. This paper is going to be developed with the intention to have a systematic comparative study on the fear metaphors in the English and the Chinese language.This research on fear metaphors is conducted under the theory of conceptual metaphors outlined by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). In the recent years, relative studies on the metaphors are widely conducted and more and more importance is attached to the academic research on the studies of emotional language. However, different from our emphasis on comparative study between the English and the Chinese language, many researches tend to focus only on the English language, limiting the depth and profoundness of the study on fear metaphors. This paper therefore is designed to focus on the comparative study on fear metaphors in both English and Chinese in order to dig out more thoughts on the study of fear metaphors.This research aims to make an attempt to collect as many language expressions about fear as possible as the data sources for our further analysis. Different language areas such as culture, literature, industry and law will be explored on the expressions of fear. Qualitative and quantitative methods and approaches will be both applied in the process of conceptualization of fear. Fear metaphors can be physically sourced as the people's body language, and meanwhile deeply influenced by cultural characteristics. It is amazing that from this research we find actually there are many similarities between the fear metaphors in the English and the Chinese language.This paper falls into five parts.The first part is the introduction, which concludes the background, the research objectives, the significance of the study and the layout. Meanwhile, research methods are briefly talked about.The second part is the literature review. Based on an overview of studies on the conceptualization of emotions in cognitive linguistics, this part focuses on the study of fear metaphor in English and Chinese. According to the analysis, problems such as lacking of prototypical cognitive models, the insufficiency of data, misunderstanding about basic metaphorical principles and so on exist in the previous study. Thus, a thorough study of fear based on a larger quantity of fear metaphors from both English and Chinese is necessary for a better understanding of the concept of fear.Chapter three is the comparison of prototypical cognitive model for fear between English and Chinese. In the fourth part, details of the similarities and differences between the English and the Chinese language of fear metaphors will be further discussed and in the last part, major findings of the study are summarized along with its limitations and suggestions for further study.The significance of the study lies in that we try to give a deeper and more detailed exploration of fear through our study. Secondly, the study can lay out the cultural influences on the differences between the fear metaphors in the English and the Chinese language. We intend to find out similarities and difference of fear metaphors between English and Chinese in a more systematic outline, which may offer some hints on the further researches on emotional metaphors between the two languages. In addition, it leads to initiate a way in the comparative study of prototypical cognitive model of other emotions, such as anger and sadness, between not only English and Chinese but also other languages.