A Comparative Study Of Metaphors Of Love In English And Chinese Poems

The study of metaphor has undergone a long history. In the traditional rhetorical view, metaphor is one of the rhetorical devices or linguistic phenomena. The study of modern metaphor is not confined to rhetorical devices any longer. Scholars have made comprehensive and profound research on the nature and features of metaphor. The nature and features of metaphor has become an important subject in the study of metaphor. Metaphor is an essential means of thinking and a common cognitive phenomenon which is pervasive and essential in language and thought. It is a perceptual and conceptualizing tool by which human beings understand the surrounding world.Emotion is an important subject in the study of cognitive linguistics. Meanwhile, emotion experience is a basic content which poems try to convey. As an important theme in poetry, love plays an important part in emotion concepts. Because metaphor is an essential component in poetry, poets often metaphorize love in order to describe it vividly.Many foreign scholars begin to study the metaphors in poetry from the perspective of cognition. In China, Lan Chun (2005) studies the metaphors and metonymies in Qin Guan's masterpieces which is written by Qin Guan, a famous poet in Song Dynasty (960—1279). Other metaphor studies on Chinese poems from cognitive perspective are rarely seen, let alone the comparative study of metaphors of a certain theme in both English and Chinese poems.Different nations display different cultural experience as well as the same bodily experience, which determine that there may be similarities and differences of metaphors in different cultures. Based on this thinking, the thesis explores the conceptualization of the emotion of love and investigates numerous English and Chinese poetic lines. The conclusions are drawn as follows:(1) English and Chinese poems share the similar metaphorical concepts, such as UNITY, PLANT, FIRE, ILLNESS, A FLUID IN A CONTAINER, JOURNEY and FOOD metaphor and a metonymic principle: THE PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS STAND FOR LOVE.(2) English poems tend to resort to economic exchange, valuable object, sun, star, sport, game, magic, possessed object and deity to conceptualize love. Chinese poems tend to utilize agriculture-related objects, body parts (especially internal organs such as"heart"and"intestine") and natural images such as moon to conceptualize love. Totems play an important part in Chinese culture especially Chinese poems. The male phoenix and the female phoenix are called feng (凤) and huang (凰) respectively. Poets compare the pursuit of love just as feng (凤) pursues huang (凰) in Chinese poems.(3) Metaphor is the spirit of poetry. The metaphors of love in English and Chinese poems are derived from conventional conceptual metaphors in our daily life. The metaphors of love in English and Chinese poems are vivid images which are developed from the universal metaphors and metonymies.Metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon but also a cultural phenomenon. Based on the comparative study of the metaphors of love in English and Chinese poems, this research finds out the thought pattern behind two cultures. The metaphors in the poems reflect the way people understand and explain the world in which the poets live. It is the cognitive universality and cultural relativity that lead to the similarities and differences of metaphors between the two languages. The author hopes that the present study is useful for the better understanding of English and Chinese poems.