A Study Of The Conceptual Metaphor Of Emotions In English And Chinese

The study of metaphor has a history of more than 2000 years. Metaphor is regarded as a figure of speech in tradition, that is, a linguistic phenomenon. With the development of cognition of human being, many researchers from various perspectives conducted large amounts of theoretical researches on metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson proposed a new theory of metaphor in the book Metaphors We Live by published in 1980. They view that metaphor is pervasive and ubiquitous in human's language and thought. Metaphor in essence is a model of thought and effective cognitive tool for human beings to understand the new world.Conceptual metaphor is an important concept in cognitive linguistics, which illustrates or comprehends a relatively abstract conceptual domain by a more concrete one; it is a mapping between two conceptual domains. Conceptual metaphor and linguistic metaphor (or linguistic metaphorical expression) are two different concepts, but they are closely related to each other. Conceptual metaphor governs linguistic metaphor and linguistic metaphor is the surface manifestation of the conceptual metaphor. Conceptual metaphor can be classified according to the cognitive functions it performs into three types: structural metaphor, ontological metaphor, and orientational metaphor. Conceptual metaphor bears two features: universality and Systematicity.Emotion is an important aspect of human experience and in nature is an abstract concept or feeling. Since cognition can influence and be influenced by emotion, the study of human emotion is of great significance towards the study of human cognition. Emotion is often expressed in language which is mostly in metaphorical terms.This dissertation conducts a cross-linguistic research on the metaphor of four emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, and fear in English and Chinese. Based on the analysis of a large amount of linguistic data from English and Chinese, it tries to explore the similarities and differences between the two languages in terms of conceptual metaphors of the four emotions and probe how shared experience as well as cultural variation influences the conceptualization of the four emotions, this is the academic value of this dissertation. The research finds that there are many similarities in the major conceptual metaphors of the four basic emotions in English and Chinese, and at the same time, the differences between them should be paid attention to. The similarities result from common human bodily experiences and nearly universal physiologic phenomena in conceptualizing the four emotions while differences from cultural restraints. This dissertation tends to account for these differences by referring to the four-humour doctrine in western philosophy and the yin-yang theory, five elements theory in Chinese philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine.