A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Metaphorical Weather Idioms

Idioms have been treated as "dead metaphor" by traditional linguists. They are taken as conventional fixed phrases, which is unanalyzable and arbitrary and the meaning is not equivalent to the combination of the constituents. With the advent of cognitive linguistics, many scholars have begun to put the theory of cognitive linguistics into the study of idioms, especially to conduct many studies of idioms on the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and other cognitive linguists, thus leading the studies of idioms to the stage of interpretation. The results of cognitive linguistics indicate that:most of the idioms are motivated and they are the products of human concept system, that is, the meaning of idioms can be deduced.In the book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson maintains that metaphor is no longer regarded as a figure of speech, but a thinking mode. And metaphor acts as a means for perceiving abstract and intangible experience in terms of the familiar and concrete. Weather, one of the basic human experiences, is often used to express and explain other basic areas, thus formed weather metaphors.Based on CMT, this thesis attempts to validate whether weather idioms are conceptualized metaphorically and find out how the metaphorical representation of weather is conceptually structured as well as whether different cultures share similar or different metaphorical concepts of weather. The data used in the study are collected from dictionaries as well as the Internet. In this thesis, the approach of the combination of description and interpretation is adopted and both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed.The thesis firstly reviews the previous studies of idioms by scholars at home and abroad, pointing out their findings and limitations (in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2) and suggests that studies of idioms should be conducted at the conceptual level on the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980); And then Chapter 3 is an introductin of CMT; Chapter 4 and 5 are the main parts of the thesis, which make a detailed contrastive analysis of the similarities and differences between the five weather idioms (wind, rain, cloud, thunder, lightning and snow) respectively as well as the causes contributed to them; Finally, the thesis sums up the findings and limitations of the present study and suggests some areas for further idiomatic researches (in Chapter 6).The major findings of this study are as follows:Firstly, there are more Chinese weather idioms than English; Secondly, according to the statistics in terms of emotional color among the five types of weather, it is found that among Chinese metaphorical idioms, commendatory terms take up the largest proportion; while in English, the amount of neuter terms comes first, and derogatory terms second; Thirdly, though the two languages are developed in different nationalities, there exist similarities. There are several similar target domains in both English and Chinese such as emotion domain, adversity domain, quantity domain, speed domain and so on. The reasons for these similarities lie in the fact that weather metaphors are rooted in common bodily experience with the same physical and psychological basis both in English and Chinese. Besides the similarities, there are certain differences between the two languages. The mapping from the weather domain to the human moral domain, love domain, edification domain and talent domain, which exist in Chinese, cannot be found in English, while, the mapping from thunder to attention is not in existence in Chinese. In a word, in weather metaphors, similarities and differences both exist. It is believed that this study will shed light on the studies of contrastive analysis, translation and cross-cultural communication.