Comparative Study On Metaphorical Meaning Of Vocabulary With The Denotation Of "Face" Between Chinese And English

Metaphor is not only a kind of figures of speech, but also a basic way of people to recognize the world, and more importantly, it is the production of our thinking and behavior. People always use familiar experience or fellings in recognizing the new concepts, that is to say, the essence of metaphor is the mapping from familiar cognitive domain to unfamiliar cognitive domain in order to make new concepts. The cognitive rule that man cognize things from the near to the far, from the simple to the complex, and from the concrete to the abstract determines the basic role in cognizing the world of bodily experience. And the metaphorization of body-part terms is one of the basic means of forming and expressing concepts.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory, this paper made a contrastive study on the cognitive features of metaphoric expressions involving the English face and Chinese Lian and Mian, studies the similarity and dissimilarity between these two languages, and emphatically analyse the factors that causing these dissimiatities. This paper analyses"face"metaphors in order to probe into similarities and differences of Chinese and English cognition. It helps us to understand the metaphoric means of the body part terms, and also have a significant enlightenment to the Chinese teaching as a foreign language.The present paper is composed with eight parts:The first part is an introduction, with the development of tranditional cognitive linguistic, the concept of metaphor has changed. This part also states that metaphorization of body-part terms is the chief means of cognition of human kind.The second part making a brief account of the significance of this subject. This part also states the materials and methods used in this thesis, clarifying the defects of this study.The third part introduce the different kinds of meaning between Chinese "Lian "and "Mian" and English "Face" according to the Chinese Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary.The fourth part talks about the similarity of the metaphoric meaning with the concept like "Lian" and "Mian" between Chinese and English, including the abstract aspect and the specific aspect. The fifth part talks about the dissimilarity of the metaphoric meaning with the concept like "Lian" and "Mian" between Chinese and English, which means metaphor of the two langueges are uncorresponding or even vacant.The sixth part is try to find the answer that cause the differences between metaphor of "Lian" and "Mian" and "Face", it'll focus on the perspective that the way of thinking and the cultural psychology.The seventh part talks about the metaphor of "Lian" and "Mian" and "Face" that provide the inspiration to foreign language teaching, in the process of foreign language teaching, understanding the similarities and dissimilarities between these two languages is helpful for us to improve the cross-cultural capacity.The eighth part is the conclusion, which summarize the significance of this subject and the inspiration to foreign language teaching.