A Contrastive Study Of Emotional Expressions In Both English And Chinese

During the recent two decades, the research of human emotion in terms of language and the linguistic expressions associated with them have aroused great interest. However, unlike the concrete objects, emotion is an abstract phenomenon which is too complex to define. In fact, there is still no consensus about what emotion is and how to describe it. Many linguists have worked on this subject from various perspectives with no generally accepted definition emerging. This thesis makes a contrastive study of English and Chinese emotional expressions containing human body parts from a cognitive perspective.Cognitive linguists believe that language is part of our overall cognitive capacities and human language corresponds to human categorization or conceptualization which is based on human basic experiences. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, leading representatives of Cognitive Linguistics, develop a philosophical theory called experientialism (1980). According to Lakoff, most of our thinking is metaphorical and our everyday experience is reflected in the language we use (Metaphors We Live By); more often than not, human understanding undergoes the procedure from the concrete to the abstract and from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Additionally, he points out that metonymy is a kind of cognitive model rather than a rhetorical device. It helps human beings to understand a matrix domain by its subdomain or vice versa. Based on the hypothesis that the conceptualization of the emotion is also motivated by these two striking cognitive models, data of emotional expressions containing body parts have been collected and analyzed. In the light of the present study, I am able to come to the following conclusions:1) The conceptual theory developed by Lakoff and the other cognitive linguists is applicable in the study of English and Chinese emotional expressions. Metaphor and metonymy play an important role in the conceptualization of emotion. They are cognitive instruments that offer ways of thinking about things around us, not just semantic extensions of one isolated2) category to another category in a different field, but the connections and relations between categories. In addition, it also indicates that although metaphor and metonymy are distinctive processes in principle, in some emotional expressions, they do not seem to be mutually exclusive. That is, these two models sometimes work together to define emotions. 3) With the common human bodily experience, in the conceptualization of emotion, there is a considerable degree of similarity in the emotional expressions in both Chinese and English languages, both languages sharing the same underlying conceptual metaphors and metonymies. Thus many emotional expressions are found to be predictable.4) The project here also indicates that owing to different cultural backgrounds, the choices of body parts which Chinese people employ to construct emotional expressions differ from that of the English. The Chinese emotional expressions contain more body parts, especially the internal parts than that of the English.Finally, the thesis underscores the implications for such fields as Chinese - English translation, cross-cultural communication and foreign-language teaching and learning.