A Comparative Study Of Chinese 甜/苦 And English SWEET/BITTER Taste Metaphors

Metaphor study, which can be traced back to Aristotle, has been the interest of linguists and rhetoricians for more than 2000 years. In 1980, the publication of Metaphors We Live By, a seminal study by Lakoff and Johnson made metaphor study a branch of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguists maintain that "metaphor is cognitive in nature, and that metaphors are powerful cognitive tools for our conceptualization of abstract categories" (Ungerer & Schmid, 1996:114);human conceptual systems are to a large extent metaphorical in the sense that they contain mappings of inference patterns from typically more concrete domains to typically more abstract domains (Yu, 1998) .The cognitive approach to metaphor still faces two major questions that require cross-linguistic and cross-cultural researches (ibid) : the first is whether abstract human reasoning is at least partially a metaphorical version of imagistic reasoning;the second is that of universality versus relativity, as it is still unknown as to what and how conceptual metaphors are universal, widespread, or cultural-specific.A large number of studies have been made adopting the cognitive approach to metaphor. In some of these studies, taste metaphors are touched upon, but mainly at a generic level or in the discussion of other sensory perception (Yu, 2003, Clive. Cazeaux, 2002;Johnston, 2003). In recent years, Chinese scholars also begin to notice the cognitive approach to metaphor and some researches applied it to the investigation of the Chinese language. Among them Su (苏以文, 1989 ) makes a systematic macro study of the Chinese taste metaphors;Li (李金兰., 2005)studies and summarizes the cognitive structures and semantic features of taste metaphors. There are also researches involved in the comparison of metaphors between Chinese and English. For example, Yu (1998) compares the metaphorical expressions of anger in English and Chinese and finds out that the two languages share the same central metaphor ANGER IS HEAT. Lan (蓝纯, 2003) makes an investigation of spatial metaphors UP and DOWN in Chinese and English, and concludes that the metaphorical extensions of these two concepts in both cultures are highly similar. However, in these comparative studies, there are few studies related to taste metaphor.Based on the previous researches, this thesis attempts to make a comparative studyof the Chinese 3tf (tian) /^(ku) and English SWEET/ BITTER taste metaphors from a cognitive point of view with the help of corpus. It aims to explore the cognitive basis and features, the similarities and differences of the metaphorical extensions of the four taste concepts, and also to discuss the result from the cultural angle.Corpus is adopted in my thesis for the collection of the words tagging the concepts W'B in Chinese and SWEET/ BITTER in English. The meaning entries of the words tagging these four concepts and the metaphorical extensions of them as reflected in the corpora are compared to find out the similarities and the differences. Through the comparison, we find that the metaphorical extensions of ffi/i§ in Chinese and SWEET/BITTER in English share most of the target domains in the mapping and differ in elaborations. The similarity is reflected mainly at a generic level with most of the metaphorical extensions consistent. The difference is mainly reflected in the elaboration of the extension, such as Stf/^ are often adopted generally whereas SWEET/BITTER are applied specifically, and in Chinese, ^ enjoys a higher frequency and a wider usage whereas the situation is different in English. There is also evidence to show that ^ in Chinese is more promoted than repulsed, which is not the case in English.After a detailed analysis of the similarities and differences as reflected through the comparison, The result is discussed from the angle of different thinking modes, religion and medicine. At last we get the following conclusion:1. Stf/i^ and SWEET/ BITTER taste metaphors play similar roles in structuring our physical and mental feeling in both cultures.2. The metaphorical extension of the four taste concepts is inseparable from our physical, social and cultural experience. This reflects what cognitive linguists claim that our conceptual system is grounded in our bodily experience.3. The difference is mainly caused by difference between Western and Eastern thinking modes. The approval of ^ in Chinese is inseparable from the influence of Confucianism, Buddhism, and the traditional Chinese medical science.