The Sampling Analysis Of Metaphors In English And Chinese

The issue of metaphor in language has been a great subject for linguists, psychologists and philosophers. Based on the existed research, the thesis carries a comparative analysis on the metaphor in two literary works of Chinese and English and discusses the differences of the metaphor's expression and the reasons causing those differences.First, the thesis introduces the former relative metaphor theories which are Substitution Theory, Interaction Theory and Comparison Theory. It also gives the expatiation on the definition of metaphor and decides which definition is chosen in the study. Then, it discusses types of metaphor based on cognitive features, syntactic formation and semantic structures. Metaphor is a kind of cognitive mode of human beings, so its character and function should be the same even for different language speakers. However, influenced by ways of expression in language, the appearance of its construction elements is different.In the thesis, there are 100 metaphor sentences respectively chosen at random from two literary books in Chinese and English. Through the quantitative and sampling analysis and research, it helps us achieve a specific and numeric understanding on the commonness and individuality of metaphor use.From the research, it shows that in the tri-items of tenor, vehicle and conjunction of the construction type, the number of metaphor sentences in Chinese is 10, the number in English is 11. While in the bi-items of tenor and vehicle, the number of metaphor sentences in Chinese is 12, the number in English is 10. The difference is small, but it indicates that in the metaphor expression, Chinese is more concise and connotative than English.From the counted numbers of the covert tenor and covert vehicle in the single item, we can find the form of covert vehicle in both Chinese and English appearsmuch more than the form of covert tenor. It can show that the purpose of using metaphor is not to give prominence to vehicle, but is to use the characteristic of vehicle. When the vehicle is clear or can be recognized from the context, then the vehicle can be omitted.From its syntactic elements, we can find that the proportion of tenor used as subject and object is contrary in Chinese and in English. And there is not a single tenor appearing in the location of predicate verb. Maybe it is because that, in the structure of subject and predicate, the subject is the old information, and the predicate provides new information. Meanwhile, there are 10 metaphors in which the tenor is used as attributive, and 4 metaphors in which tenor is used as centre, and 1 metaphor in which the tenor is used as apposition in Chinese. But there are only 10 metaphors in which the tenor is used as attributive. From analysis, we can find that it is caused by the chanciness of the materials we have chosen. Because when we translate the corresponding Chinese sentence into English, the tenor can be used as centre and apposition. And as for the vehicle, it generally provides new information. So both in Chinese and English, its frequency appearing in the object is higher than that in subject. In the structure that the vehicle is used as centre, the tenor can be centre or attributive. No matter in which situation, this attributive-centre structure can be transformed into a subject-predicate structure. And the tenor is used as predicate or a part of predicate (object or predicative) in the transformed subject-predicate structure.