A Cognitve Approach To Conventional Metaphor And Human Body-part Conventional Metaphor In English And Chinese

Recent years have witnessed an ever-increasing interest in multidisplinary studies of metaphor. More and more people realized its significance and it has run into metaphormana in European countries and America. In China there are also more and more "metaphor fans".Aristotelian approach, the traditional linguistic approach, the pragmatic approach, and the interaction approach all failed to recognize the fundamental conceptual nature of metaphor and the indispensable role metaphor plays in human conceptualization. The cognitive linguistic approach claims that metaphor is a prevalent phenomenon in ordinary language, and that metaphor arises from mapping among different cognitive domains, especially the mapping from the concrete (source) domains to abstract (target) domains, that metaphors are grounded in our bodily and physical experience.Due to the fact that the three conceptual metaphors, structural metaphors, orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors, have been internalized or conventionalized in language users' mind, Lakoff calls them "conventional metaphors" or "dead metaphors" because they structure our ordinary conceptual system. "Novel metaphor" or "new metaphor" is not an essentially different phenomenon from conventional metaphor; they basically use the same cognitive mechanism as conventional metaphor. So we live by metaphor, or to a great extent, we live by conventional metaphor. Therefore, a complete and detailed study on conventional metaphor is necessary. Although so far many scholars have touched conventional metaphor in one or two sections of their books or papers, few of them has taken conventional metaphor itself as their major objective and examined itsystematically and comprehensively. Moreover, those scholars, whether at home or abroad, have based their researches only on their native language or single-language corpus. This thesis collects data from both English and Chinese resources and attempts to make bilingual comparisons so as to find some cross-cultural evidence supporting the universality of those hypotheses about metaphor.Since most basic metaphors are rooted in our bodily experience, it is found that conventional metaphors which use human body-part terminologies take up a large portion of metaphors in languages. Therefore this paper proposes the new concept "HBCM" to account for the similarities and differences between English and Chinese from cultural and grammatical perspectives on the basis of dictionary-based data in view of the fact that cognitive semantics has reached a point where it has to be supported by cross-cultural research. Similarities between the two languages can be attributed to the common human bodily experience. The result serves as evidence in supporting Lakoff s statement that metaphors are embodied. In other words, metaphors, though imaginary in nature, are not completely arbitrary. They seem to have a bodily or psychological basis. More weight is attached to the analysis of what on earth causes some differences between the two languages. The paper tries to account for the reason why Chinese tend to utilize more internal organs than English in HBCM by referring to the theory of five elements of Chinese medicine. The cases of "nose" and "thumb" are also raised to prove that human body-part conventional metaphors are influenced by cultural models. Besides, some different grammatical differences between English and Chinese are briefly discussed. Chapter 5 makes a short summary and raises the issues for future study.