Metaphorical Features Of Idioms

This thesis discusses metaphorical features of idioms. Idiom refers to a phrase whose meaning is different from the meanings of each word considered separately. Metaphor refers to a mapping (in the mathematical sense) from a source domain to a target domain. Metaphors include ontological metaphors, orientational metaphors, and structural metaphors.Ontological metaphors of idioms refer to view abstract things in idioms as concrete things. The most obvious ontological metaphors are personification and the container metaphors. The tenor of a container metaphor has the same characteristics with a container; that is, it has boundaries. The bounding surface may be whether a wall, a fence, or an abstract line or plane. Orientational metaphors of idioms give concepts of an idiom spatial orientation. There are mainly UP-DOWN and FRONT-BACK spatial orientation in idioms. Metaphorical features about UP-DOWN include: MORE IS UP, LESS IS DOWN; GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN; HEALTH AND LIFE ARE UP, SICKNESS AND DEATH ARE DOWN; CONSCIOUS IS UP, UNCONSCIOUS IS DOWN; HAPPY IS UP, SAD IS DOWN; HIGH STATUS IS UP, LOW STATUS IS DOWN, and HAVING CONTROL OR FORCE IS UP, BEING SUBJECT TO CONTROL OR FORCE IS DOWN. Metaphorical features about FRONT-BACK include: THE OPEN IS FRONT and THE HIDDEN IS BACK; THE IMPORTANT IS FRONT and THE LESS IMPORTANT IS BACK, and THE DEVELOPED IS FRONT and THE LESS DEVELOPED IS BACK. Structural metaphors of idioms mean that one concept of an idiom is metaphorically structured in terms of another. The biggest characteristic of structural metaphors, that is, systematicity, reflects in two ways: the internal systematicity and the external systematicity.The analyses of this thesis show that idioms are motivated by conceptual metaphors and both of them have life experience as their groundings. A lot of idioms in Chinese and English have obvious metaphorical features.