A Contrastive Study On The Differences Between English And Chinese Metaphor

This thesis attempts to find out the differences between English and Chinese metaphor in a contrastive way in order to deepen our understanding of the cognitive process of metaphor.The author reviews the main metaphor theories and the contemporary metaphor studies both at home and abroad, and then briefly explains the reasons for the topic selection. On the basis of the analysis of the collected data, the author summarizes the metaphorical concepts which reflect differences between English and Chinese metaphor. In the light of Lakoff and Johnson's classification of metaphor, the author categorizes the metaphorical concepts and analyzes them contrastively by giving examples. In the process of analysis, the author finds that the differences between English metaphor and Chinese metaphor mainly lie in the selection of mapping domains, frequency and expressive forms. These are indicated in the fact that different cultures may choose their own source domains to express the same target domain or map the same source domain onto different target domains. Moreover, various cultures have their own preference of employing different metaphors which result in different orders of frequencies. When it comes to the expressive forms, Chinese focuses on concision but English focuses on accuracy. Furthermore, it is the nouns and compounds that reflect the predominance in Chinese metaphor but verbs and phrases in English metaphor. Finally, the causes for these differences between English and Chinese metaphor are probed into from three aspects, namely, geographical location, culture as well as typology of English and Chinese.