A Contrastive Study On Body Movement Metaphors Between English And Chinese

Metaphor has been studied from the linguistic point of view to the cognitive view. Especially,over the past two decades metaphor study has become increasingly popular in the field of cognitive science.It is Conceptual Metaphor theory raised by Lakoff and Johnson reinforces the trend of cognitive study on metaphor.According to this theory,the core of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. Our ordinary conceptual system by means of which we live,think and act is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.That conceptual metaphor has become part of our everyday speech is an important concept in Conceptual Metaphor Theory.Conceptual metaphors are rooted in our bodily experience.Human body has the most important status in human being's cognition.Body metaphor is in nature a kind of conceptual metaphor and it is a main cognitive method of human being.However,the study of body metaphors is still not enough.Some scholars at home made a delicate classification and contrastive study of body metaphors in English and Chinese,but most of them confined their research to the organs of human body, rarely touched human body movement metaphors,hi view of these facts,this paper takes up body movement metaphors as its topic to study,based on the analysis of a large amount of linguistic data from English and Chinese in terms of body movement metaphors.The research discovers that Chinese and English share many main body movement metaphors.These similarities reflect the fact that body movement metaphors are primarily rooted in common human bodily experience both in English and Chinese. Meanwhile,there still exist great differences affected by culture.This paper makes a relatively complete study of body movement metaphors from the cognitive perspective.Based on the contrastive study in English and Chinese,this research reinforces some theories of the contemporary cognitive approach to metaphor: conceptual metaphor,at least conceptual body movement metaphor is characterized by cognitive universality and cultural relativity.Meanwhile,it will,to a certain degree, supplement the study of body metaphor.In addition,this research will supplement the foreign language teaching and intercultural communication.