A Cognitive Approach To Body Metaphor

The thesis, by employing cognitive linguistics and contemporary metaphor theory, from the perspective of body metaphor, analyzes how human beings utilize the cognition of their bodies and experiences to obtain the cognition of the material and of the abstract world through the observation and description of metaphorical expressions of major parts of the human body in Chinese and English, and proves that bodily experience plays a fundamental role in human cognition. The thesis consists of four chapters:The first chapter introduces definitions and traditional concepts of metaphor firstly, and then especially introduces the concepts of metaphor brought forward by Lakoff and Johnson. According to whose idea, metaphors used in language expressions are mere superficies, and the real thing matters is the metaphorical concept or conceptual metaphor that is hidden deeply in our conceptual system. The conceptual metaphor is divided into three types, namely, structural metaphor, ontological metaphor and orientational metaphor.The second chapter introduces the four cognitive functions of metaphor. First, things in the world are different in various aspects, but in virtue of the metaphor, people can associate new and old things and understand unknown concepts through known ones so as to fulfill the goal of knowing the world at large; second, the essence of metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another, so people can apply the experience obtained to the unfamiliar domain to conduct appropriate standardization, categorization, quantification and rational discussions; third, metaphor can offer a new perspective from which one can see different condition and the new meaning of daily life; fourth, metaphor's analogy feature determines that it has the cognitive function of analogism.The third chapter introduces the theoretical basis for body metaphor, and...