Comprehension Of "Love" Metaphor In English And Chinese

"Metaphor" has been attracting the attention of scholars for more than 2000 years many rhetoricians and literary critics have done many researches on Metaphor, but most of them were confined to literature and rhetoric. With the development of modern science and cognition of human being, during the past 50 years many researchers from various academic fields and different perspectives did more and more researchers on metaphors. Especially the publication of "Metaphor we live by" by Lakoff and Johnson a new theory of metaphor, which mainly states that metaphor is pervasions and essential in language and thought. They maintain there exists close relationship between language and metaphor and cognition. Metaphor is not only rhetoric, but a model of thought and effective cognitive too for human being to understand abstract domain in terms of another concrete domain.Metaphor is so pervasive that according to statistics, above 70 percent of expressions in our daily language are metaphorical. People use it unconsciously. Here is a very vivid one: when the first time I showed the outline of my thesis to Professor Dong Junmin, he saw an obvious mistake in the content that is a title of one of the chapters in the body is exactly the same as the title of my thesis—Comparison of English and Chinese love metaphor. Seeing this instead of explaining more he said: " They don't have the same position in the family hierarchy, how can they two share the same title" What a vivid metaphor which saves time and words and helps understanding.In this essay I have attempted to discuss the similarities and dissimilarity of cross-culture metaphor by making a comparative study of love metaphor in English and Chinese.There are six chapters in my essay. Chapter one is the introduction part, it gives a generalidea of what is "metaphor" and development of understanding it. Chapter two provides the theoretical basis for further study of love metaphor. In following two chapters, that is chapter three and chapter four, with the data collected from love fictions, love movies, love songs and partly from dictionaries, newspapers and English professional works like Lakoff and Johnson's, the author categorized these expressions into 2 parts: metaphors for love and metaphors for lover. In chapter three the author concentrates on the similarities in the expressions of love and lover metaphors shared by both languages and the cause for that is the cognitive universality.However the expressions of love have difference as well owing to the culture difference, so in chapter 4 the author focuses on the differences between English and Chinese love metaphors, analyzing the causes for dissimilarities from the perspective of cognition and culture. Chapter 5 is cultural relativity which accounts for the similarities and dissimilarities, similarities are rooted in cognition universality, and there are several cultural factors which cause the dissimilarities, the author attempts to amylases them from 3 main aspects: Religions, Aesthetics, and Living Environment. Chapter 6 is the concluding part, through a comparative study of love metaphor in English and Chinese, the author verifies the existence of similarity and dissimilarity of cross-culture metaphor based on the cognitive universality and cultural relativity.