A Comparative Study Of "Red" Metaphor In English And Chinese

In this thesis, I have attempted to make a comparison between the similarity and dissimilarity of red metaphor by studying the examples cited from an English corpora and a Chinese one.Of the five parts in this thesis, part one provides a brief introduction to the main traditional theories and contemporary cognitive theory of metaphor, and presents the research background and research motives of the current red metaphor study; part two lays the theoretical foundation of the study, giving working definitions to "metaphor", "culture" and "cognition"; part three narrows down the discussion to the color metaphor and further to the red metaphor; part four gives an analysis of the data collected from English Classics 1000, complemented by more contemporary reading matter and Chinese newspapers and magazines, summarizes the frequently used metaphorical meanings of red terms, and categorizes the metaphorical meanings of red term by giving examples. Based on the analysis of the collected data, part four goes on to look closely at the similarity and dissimilarity of red metaphor in English and Chinese, discusses possible reasons for the same and different red metaphor from the perspective of cognition and culture; part five is the concluding part. Through a contrastive study of red metaphor in English and Chinese, the author proves the existence of both similarity and dissimilarity of cross-culture metaphor due to the common cognitive basis and cultural variation.