System Research On The Metaphor Of Human Body

Metaphor is an important means to perceive the world as well as a component of linguistic symbol which is a tool to describe the world and realize social intercourse.At earliest human beings perceive and express the objective world by means of human body metaphor, which is the universal mode of thinking of primitive men. Human beings not only project their body experience on the external reality but also project their organs' movements and properties on the movements, changes and properties of the external reality. That's why there are so many words (nouns, verbs and adjectives) which are not human organs but formed by human organ terms via metaphor. There are also many sentences formed by human organ terms via metaphor. This research project on human body metaphor mainly includes the following sections:Chapter one: body experience and metaphor. It mainly discusses metaphor and its definition, the basic principle of metaphor, body metaphor and the role it plays in language and the linguistic type of body metaphor.Chapter two: The mechanism of body metaphor: from mental mechanism to speech mechanism. It mainly discusses the cognition of body experience, the projection of body experiences on the analogous objects and the speech mechanism of metaphor. Body metaphor is the most important, directest and richest cognitive experience. The fundamental reason of the production of body metaphor is that it is the primitive cognitive schema in human's brains which will project the body experience to the analogous external realities as long as there are some similarities between the external reality and the human body in movements, properties or the body itself.Chapter three: The linguistic form of human body metaphor and the characteristics of its usage. There are two linguistic forms of human body metaphor: one is the discourse pattern body metaphor which mainly expressed by simile, metaphor, personification and analogy, some of which have already become words by means of trope and analogy; the other kinds of body metaphor are in form of words or expressions.Chapter four: The type analysis of human body analysis. It mainly analyzed the types of nouns, verbs and adjectives that are related to human bodies. Nouns using human body metaphor can be divided into three types according to similarity in shape, position or function. Verbs using human body metaphor can de divided into four types: From the bottom up type, from the top down type, from external to internal type and from internal to external type. Adjectives using human body metaphor mainly include space type, time type and properties type.Chapter five: The exploration on the other aspects of human body metaphor. It mainly discusses the concept construction function of the human body metaphor and the systematization of human body metaphor. Plenty of concepts with metaphor meaning were constructed via human body metaphor and these concepts are connected rather than isolated so that they formed an enormous system.