A Comparative Study On Time Metaphor In English And Chinese

The omnipresent uses of metaphor make it a hot topic for researchers at all times. And the research of it witnesses a very long history that can be traced back to as early as Aristotle. Guided by Aristotle's view, scholars for a long time regarded metaphor only as a figure of speech, a rhetorical device. It is since 1930s that the study of metaphor has become an important field for research within the cognitive paradigm. As the pioneer in the researching of metaphor, I.A. Richard pointed out that metaphor is the"omnipresent principle of language"(1936:50) in philosophy of Rhetoric.In 1980, the book Metaphors We Live By, written by Lakoff and Jonhson, broke a new path for understanding of metaphors. It transformed the angle of view from linguistic study to cognitive approach. Metaphor is no longer regarded as a figure of speech, but a figure of thought (Lakoff: 1980) Metaphor as a means to be used to perceive abstract and intangible areas of experience in terms of familiar and concrete. Metaphor in fact belongs to a kind of cognitive phenomena of human beings. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."(Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 3).Time is an abstract and basic concept in human's life and the research of it can be traced back to the remote antiquity. Based on the theory of conceptual metaphor, this thesis has made an initial attempt to validate whether time is conceptualized by metaphor, that is, whether time is understood through familiar or concrete experience and how the metaphorical representation of time is conceptual structured, whether different cultures share similar or different metaphorical concept of time. These questions drive the author to collect data of time metaphor in English and Chinese and the findings show that in time metaphors similarities and differences both exist while differences appear more outstanding. Although not all the differences can be fully accounted for, the analysis done shows that cultures cast considerable influence on the creation of metaphors and time metaphor can also explain that different culture system between eastern and western as well as the universal cognitive system of human exists.