Contrastive Studies On Container Metaphors In English And Chinese

Metaphors, which are considered as a pervasive phenomenon, have been largely applied to daily conversations and literary works from ancient times to present. Beginning from Aristotle, many western philosophers, rhetoric experts and linguists have carried out systematic researches on metaphors from different perspectives, and obtained a series of systematic and influential metaphorical theories. The research approaches to metaphors in west mainly include the Aristotelian approach, the traditional linguistic approach, the pragmatic approach and the interactionist approach.In Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) Metaphor we live by, the co-writers were the first to study metaphors from cognitive perspective. They point out that metaphors have close relationship with human cognition system. They argue that metaphors should not be regarded as a figure of speech but as a figure of thought, a way of thinking and a very essential tool to conceptualize the world. Hence, they rename the metaphors as conceptual metaphors. This cognitive view to metaphors which possess great significance has been widely accepted in linguistic and rhetoric circles. By taking the cognitive approach to metaphor, this study focuses on container metaphors which is an important category of conceptual metaphors and assumes that in both Chinese and English there are a great many container metaphors, through which many of our fundamental concepts are structured. The present study also expounds the similarities and differences between the ways the English and the Chinese conceptualize the world through container concepts.Since the Chinese concepts NEI/WAI and English concepts IN/OUT are essential structural elements of container schema, the existence of these concepts directly means the existence of container schema. Furthermore, through detailed analysis, we...