A Contrastive Study On Metaphorical Expressions Of Basic Emotions Between English And Chinese

Emotions, as an important aspect of human experience, are at the center of human mental and social life. The study through linguistic expressions especially metaphorical linguistic expressions has always been the focus of cognitive linguistics. In recent years, cognitive linguistics has abandoned the idea that metaphor is only a figure of speech. Instead, many scholars now hold that metaphors are cognitive processes that help to create and maintain people's view of culture and play a significant role in their capacity to conceive emotions. 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. In the past two decades, extensive studies have been conducted by cognitive linguists on the function of metaphor and metonymy in the conceptualization of emotions in English.The present thesis attempts to further cross-cultural studies in cognitive linguistics by examining and categorizing the use of certain emotion metaphors and metonymies in Chinese in correspondence to those in English. It is found that in both English and Chinese, emotions are largely conceptualized and expressed in metaphorical and metonymical terms. On the one hand, both English and Chinese follow the same metonymical principle: they talk about emotions by describing the physiological, psychological or behavioral responses of the emotions. The two languages share some central conceptual metaphors in the conceptualization of emotions and these metaphors can be induced to a root metaphor - EMOTION IS FORCE, which organizes various subordinate metaphors and forms a coherent and systematic network in the conceptualization of emotions in both English and Chinese. On the other hand, there also exists, it is revealed, cultural relativity in the metaphorical and metonymical conceptualization of emotions in English and Chinese. It is argued that the universality is caused by the fact that the conceptualization of emotions is embodied, namely it has a basis in bodily experience or it is closely related to the physiological functioning of human body while the cultural relativity is accounted for by the underlying cultural models. The present thesis makes a relatively complete and detailed study of emotion metaphors, from the cognitive perspective instead of the traditional viewpoint of metaphor. Based on the comparative study between English and Chinese, this research reinforces and develops some theories of the contemporary cognitive approach to metaphor: Abstract concepts are largely conceptualized and comprehended via metaphor; and conceptual metaphor, at least emotion conceptual metaphor, is characterized by cognitive universality and cultural relativity. In addition, this research will, to a certain extent, be helpful and instructive for teaching vocabulary as well as rhetoric.