Contrastive Studies Of Cognitive Metaphorical Meanings On FANG/square And YUAN/round

The study of metaphor can be traced back to over 2,000 years ago, the age of Aristotle. But for a long time, in classical theories, metaphor has been universally viewed as a rhetorical device in literature. With the development of the cognitive linguistics, classical metaphorical theory receives a challenge of cognitive metaphorical theory. In 1980, a famous book Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson was published, which was seen as the cognitive turn of the study of metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson point out that Metaphor is viewed not just as a linguistic phenomenon but as a cognitive phenomenon. Metaphor comes out of our clearly delineated and concrete experiences and allows us to construct highly abstract and elaborate concepts. Summarizing their own experiences, people tend to describe and comprehend unfamiliar things with familiar concepts so as to know about themselves and the things around them. Virtually, metaphor is the process of one cognitive field mapped onto another.Cognitive metaphorical system characterizes the universality and relativity. On the one hand, human cognitive activities are rooted in daily physical experiences. Therefore, the hypothesis of the universality of metaphorical cognition exists. On the other hand, that the human physical experiences cannot be independent of a certain culture and society implies that the diversities between metaphorical systems in various cultures exist. The degrees of the differences and the similarities between languages and cultures are such questions that are urgent to be worth answering by contrastive studies. Just as Mr. Lu Shuxiang says, "To point out the differences and similarities things is easy, but to explore why they are quite different and similar is not so easy. And that is the ultimate objective of contrastive research" (Chen JiaXun, 2004) .In terms of cognitive linguistics, the thesis makes the systematic and contrastive study of cognitive metaphors on FANG/ square and YUAN /round. The whole thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter One is the introduction dealing with the reason for the topic selection, aims and methods of study, and basic frames of the thesis.Chapter Two is a review of literature about objective and cognitive approaches to semantics. This chapter follows the process in which objective approach to semantics develops into the study of cognitive approach to semantics. This chapter is a brief pectination and summary of two different philosophical views about meaning. Besides, on the basis of the dialectical criticism of objective meaning view, emdodied philosophy as philosophical foundation of meaning view of the present thesis is established.Chapter Three establishes the theoretical foundation of the contrastive study cognitive metaphors on square and round in English and Chinese: prototype theory, image schema theory, and cognitive metaphorical theory, briefly summarizes contents and relations between them, and finally discusses that they play a crucial role in polysemy.Chapter Four takes up contrastive study of cognitive metaphorical meanings on FANG / square and YUAN / round as the topic of this thesis study. This chapter attempts to conduct a cross-linguistic research into the cognitive metaphors of FANG/ square and YUAN/round and then explores the similarities and differences between cognitive metaphors of FANG and square, YUAN and round, and the relation between FANG/square and YUAN/round by analyzing a large amount of linguistic data from English and Chinese. The research discovers that Chinese and English share many main cognitive metaphors of FANG/square and YUAN/round. These similarities reflect the fact that cognitive metaphors of FANG/square and YUAN/round are primarily rooted in common human bodily and life experiences. Meanwhile, there exist great differences and some specific linguistic expressions, which reveals that metaphor exists the relativity, namely, nationality. These differences are largely due to different geographical environment, philosophical viewpoints and cultural models, since the bodily and life experience can only tell what are possible metaphors, and whether these potential metaphors are actually selected in a specific culture is mainly dependent upon the philosophical viewpoints and cultural models. From the perspective of culture philosophy, this chapter through the analysis of different cognitive metaphors on FANG/square and YUAN/round shows that thinking mode is a kind of double existences of culture and philosophy, philosophical thinking mode plays in the leading position of the whole thinking mode system and influences the language trend, and the changing of thinking mode in quality is the changing of the series of culture compositions in thinking mode. Language reflects cultural color of a nation.Chapter Five is the conclusion, which mainly summarizes and generalizes the whole content of the thesis and puts forward the questions of further deeper study.