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The Image Of Love

Posted on:2005-11-03Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:R Y YangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360125451138Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Love, as the universal emotion or passion of the human beings, is intuitionally viewed as amorphous feeling that is devoid of any conceptual content. This thesis intends to argue that the expressions of love are not random by categorizing LOVE and holographically depicting the universal conceptual structure of love for English and Chinese languages from cognitive model, which provides another evidence of the prototype theory in the domain of conceptual structure and contributes to other branches of cognitive science as well. In this paper, conceptual love is investigated in a radial way ranging from a prototypical model in the center to a category of cognitive models. Besides, the prototypical scenario is assumed, which might be a complement for the work done by George Lakoff. One point should be mentioned that the conceptual structure of love is dynamic instead of being static. In writing this paper, this author noticed the phenomena that some emotional words share the same source domains with love, she holds that further forcefully illustrates the fact that the concept of emotions is interacted, dynamic and universal. What is more, love seems to be a basic emotion that can produce other emotions such as anger, happiness, sadness, pain and etc. Though the love-related expressions in the two languages share more common intrinsic points based on the similar physiological conditions and experiences, as is well known, there is tremendous variation in the way to express and cultures encourage or discourage. This author tries to give an explanation and a deeper analysis for the above query by illustrating the English and Chinese languages and exploring the difference from the cultural perspectives as well as the cognition theory. Finally, this author provides another confirmation of Sapir-Whorf's relativity theory by concluding that the different interpretation of love in two cultures, i.e. concept structure of language motivated by certain cultural context in a greater or lesser sense reflect the different world view and influence the way people live.
Keywords/Search Tags:conceptual structure, cognitive model, prototype theory, cognition theory, prototypical scenario, motivated, cultural context
PDF Full Text Request
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