A Cognitive Linguistic Approach To Pride Metaphors

The study of metaphor has a long history in Western countries. Especially since the 1970s, with the further research in metaphor, the understanding of metaphor has been deepened: metaphor is not only a form of rhetorical device, but also a form of thought. It is an important means of man's thinking, involved in human cognitive process. As a basic cognitive structure, metaphor allows us to comprehend a relatively abstract concept by virtue of a more concrete concept, which is thus called conceptual metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson showed that metaphor is "pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action." Metaphor in essence is a perceptual and conceptualizing tool, by which human beings understand the surrounding world. Moreover, metaphor serves as an efficient source from which new meanings and new understanding rise if constructed from a new perspective. In a word, metaphor is cognitive rather than linguistic.Emotion is the most general and important experience of human beings. It originates from exposure to specific situations. Cognition and emotion are interactive. There is a systematic correlation between our emotions and our sensory-motor experiences. The research of emotion is one of the basic parts of exploring human cognition. Emotion is abstract and hard to express. It is virtually impossible to talk about emotions without conceptualizing them metaphorically (Kovecses1990, 2000).They are conceptualized and expressed in metaphorical terms. Emotion in cognitive point of view is most embodied in metaphor, the claim that metaphor is constrained by human bodily experience stands most prominently in the domain of emotion.The analysis of emotional metaphors in the English language has become a well-developed field of study and continues to expand. In the past two decades, extensive studies have been conducted by cognitive linguists on the function of metaphor and metonymy in the conceptualization of emotion in English. These previous studies have mainly been done within English and much attention has only been attached to some so-called basic emotions—happiness, anger, sadness, anxiety, and love. Consequently, a comprehensive study on the non-basic emotion metaphor such as pride metaphor is lacked. And since most scholars only focused on macro study of emotion metaphor, i.e., how is the emotion conceptualized by metaphors, then the micro-study, i.e., perceiving certain emotion metaphor category in detail and trying to find the family members of this emotion concept and the prototype, is becoming necessary.In this dissertation, we analyze the causes of pride emotion, and find that 'balanced pride as immediate response' can be regarded as a cognitive reference point in the system of concepts that we ordinarily designate with the term pride. The term self-esteem, dignity, conceit, vanity and gratification derive from 'balanced pride as immediate response', and not the other way around. By the approach of the prototype and family resemblance theory, we analyze these pride metaphors one by one and find these metaphors do not have the same attributes, but are connected by a network of overlapping similarities, that is, each item has at least one, and probably several, elements in common with one or more other items, but no, or few, elements are common to all items: they have the family resemblance.After having a micro -study, perceiving pride metaphors within English in detail and attempting to analyze the family member and prototype, we continue our discussion with a macro -study, comparative study between Chinese and English pride metaphors. We have known both metaphor and metonymy are the fundamental part of human conceptual system and the interaction of metonymies and metaphors contributes a lot to the conceptuation of emotion. According to a lot of linguistic data, we find Chinese and English share some major conceptual metaphors and metonymies in conceptualizing pride. The similarities of pride metaphors root in shared experience and the same cognitive structure, while the individualities of pride metaphors root in the differences of the modest tradition, customs, philosophy, and so on.This thesis makes a relatively detailed study of "pride" metaphors, from the cognitive perspective instead of the traditional viewpoint of metaphor. Based on the prototype, family resemblance theory and comparative study between English and Chinese, this research reinforces and develops some theories of the contemporary cognitive approach to metaphor: abstract concepts are largely formed and comprehended via metaphor; basic emotion metaphor and some non-basic emotion metaphor, at least conceptual metaphor of "pride" and other, are characterized by cognitive universality and cultural relativity. In addition, this research will, to a certain extent, be helpful and instructive for vocabulary teaching and rhetoric teaching. It will also enlighten the importance of culture induction in foreign language teaching.