English And Chinese Emotion-related Idioms: A Cognitive Perspective

Idiom as a big and an important sector of language plays a great role in helping people express their ideas. But most of idioms are hard to be interpreted due to their idiomatic meanings. Cognitive linguists like George Lakoff et al believe that most idioms are motivated by metaphoric thinking. This thesis examines both English and Chinese idioms relating to emotion in order to explain their figurative meanings on the basis of the conceptual framework developed by cognitive linguists over the past decades, compares emotion-related idioms between the two languages, and presents similarities and differences of their conceptualization.In this thesis, the author discusses the researches of idioms from various perspectives such as the formal, functional, structural and cognitive perspectives, and makes it clear that cognitive linguistics has brought an alternative way to the study of idioms. Then, the author conducts a cognitive analysis of emotion-related idioms and makes a comparison between English emotion-related idioms and Chinese correspondents to show the similarities and differences between them in terms of the conceptual metaphors and metonymies underlying them, as well as in terms of figurative meaning of idioms. Furthermore, by resorting to the conceptual blending theory raised by Fauconnier and Turner, the author attempts to confirm that there is any difference of intrinsic cognitive mechanisms in English and Chinese idioms. The author believes that a good understanding of idioms' cognitive mechanisms and their potential causes will be helpful for foreign language teaching, learning and translation.