A Corpus-based Study Of Body Metaphors

Since George Lakoff and Mark Johnson proposed the embodied hypothesis andclaimed that a major finding of Cognitive Science is the fact that the mind is inherentlyembodied, the notion of body and embodiment has been of growing importance inCognitive Linguistics. However, the myth of objectivism still dominates Western culture, and particularly Western philosophy at present, and the Cartesian separation of body andmind continues to prevail in contemporary philosophical theories, as well as othersubjects like esthetics. Mind and reason are worshipped by many people without doubtwhile body is despised as a triviality and is often associated with debauchery. Mind andbody are still generously taken as two heterogeneous entities due to the long history of theobjectivism and dualism: the former dates backto the Presocratic period and the later hasbeen with us through three hundred years.This dissertation endeavors to examine and justify Lakoff's embodied hypothesis, tofurther shatter the long-held ideas of body and to challenge the concepts of disconnectionbetween body and mind. The author believes that intrinsic quality of embodiment is a tiebetween the two worlds of Substance and spirit; the core subject of embodiment idea is totake the biological substrate not as a vessel but as the being itself; the mind and spirit arenot sublimation of the biology. Therefore, more than flesh and bones at the phisiologicallevel, body is structured by history, society and culture, thus direclty involves everyone, every nation and every culture. Embodiment is the way we cognize the world, moreexactly, it is the cognition itself.An empirical way is employed as the methodology in this dissertation, and a largenumber of lexicat evidences of body metaphors are chosen from corpus, especially themetaphor corpus—metalude, offering a solid basis for the study of embodied hypothesis.