A Comparative Study Of Love Metaphor In English And Chinese-From The Cross-Cultural Perspective

Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a kind of figures of speech, that is, a linguistic phenomenon. It is primarily decorative and ornamental in nature. With the birth and development of cognitive linguistics in recent years, more and more attention has been paid to how language operates in people's minds. The cognitive study about metaphor shows that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life and it is not just in language but also in thought and action. During the 1970's, metaphor was not only studied by linguists, but also inspired the great interest of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, etc. Among numerous achievements in research, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory put forward by George Lakoff has been attracting the most attention. The theory claims that metaphor is the basis of mankind's cognition, thought, experience, speech and behavior. It is the basic means by which we live. The nature of metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of subject matter through another kind. Metaphorical language is a surface manifestation of metaphorical thinking.This paper attempts to explore the relationship between cultural models and metaphor. Love metaphor will be focused in the paper, because love is one of the most central and pervasive aspects of human experience. On the basis of George Lakoff s Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this thesis tries to analyze the metaphorical expressions of love both in English and Chinese. A comparative study of love metaphor is conducted in English and Chinese aiming at placing the theory of metaphor on a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural basis.Since metaphor is grounded in our daily life, our experiences with the world, including both the physical and cultural experiences, motivate the creation of metaphors. Thus, reasonably different cultures will have different metaphors for the same concept, for experiential and cultural factors interfere with the employment of source domains for the same target concept. On the other hand, similar experiences give rise to identical metaphors. In the studies conducted between love expressions in English and Chinese, both similarities and differences exist. Although not all the differences can be fully accounted for, the analysis made, despite the speculative nature of much of my discussion, has shown that culture casts great influence on the creation of metaphors. It is hoped that some ideas in this paper could be of some practical significance in cross-culture communication.