A Cognitive Approach To Love Metaphors In English And Chinese Love Songs

For most of us, metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is compared to another by saying that one is the other, leaving out such words as "as" or "like". It is believed successful employment of metaphor could help achieve some artistic and rhetoric effect, and only gifted poets and eloquent speakers can be its masters. That is usually called the traditional rhetoric approach to metaphor study which has dominated for more than 2000 years and can be traced back to the work of Aristotle. Not until the 1980s did the rising of cognitive linguistics and the publication of Metaphors We Live BY gradually bring about kind of a metaphor revolution. According to the new theory, metaphor is pervasive and essential in language and thought, and people's ordinary conceptual system is also metaphorical in nature. The essence of metaphor is to understand and experience one thing in terms of another. In this sense, metaphor is no longer a matter of words but the result and the instrument for human's cognitive activities.In this thesis a large number of love metaphors from both Chinese and English songs have been investigated systematically to reveal the conceptual systems of love behind. It is found that English and Chinese love metaphors share similar central conceptual system LOVE IS A UNITY, while their UNITY is not...