A Comparative Study On Temperature Metaphor In English And In Chinese

Traditionally metaphor is viewed as a rhetoric device; however, it is not enough to study it just as a rhetoric tool. As the development of cognitive linguistics, the study on metaphor has got a breakthrough. Metaphor is not only a language phenomenon; it is rather a kind of thinking and reasoning. Metaphor is a process of explaining and understanding one conceptual domain by using other more concrete domains. The mappings between these two domains are based on similarity. The nature of metaphor is cognitive phenomenon and it is an important way for people to understand the world. Therefore, the production of metaphor is based on the experience of human being toward the world. Bodily experience and cultural differences play an important role in metaphor.Temperature is an important concept in human life, and it is constructed by four categories: cold, cool, warm and hot. Though scholars have done comparative study on these four categories, they do not explain in detail causes for similarities and differences from cognitive and cultural perspectives. This thesis investigates similarities and differences of temperature metaphors between English and Chinese by applying Lakoff and Johnson's theories on metaphor. Temperature metaphors in two languages are studied respectively in order to find similarities and differences. The research discovers that though these two languages are developed in different nationalities, similarities exist. There are five similar target domains: emotion domain, situation domain, interest and attention domain, color tone domain and disease domain. These similarities lie in the fact that temperature metaphors are rooted in common bodily experience with the same physical and psychological basis both in English and Chinese. A deeper investigation shows that two image schemas: the up-down schema and the balance schema account for similarities between English and Chinese. Besides the similarities, there are certain differences between these two languages, one is social status and power domain and the other is distance domain. The mapping from the temperature domain to social status and power domain which exists in Chinese can not be found in English, in like manner, the mapping from temperature domain to distance domain in English is not in existence in Chinese. These differences are due to the cultural differences such as value system and custom.This thesis makes a study of temperature metaphor from cognitive perspective, and to a certain degree, it supplements the study of this field. Through the comparison of similarities and differences between English and Chinese, it proves that the conceptual metaphors are closely linked to human experience of temperature in their daily life.