A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Emotion Metaphors

Emotions is the most universal and important aspect of human experience, it is a very important components of human experience. The general psychology divides the emotion into emotions and feelings. e,g happiness, sadness, anger, fear, love…etc. The emotion is people's attitude and experience to the objective world and reflection of people's sufficiency. The human emotion is abstract and abundant in language and interacted with cognition. The research to human emotion is one of the basic parts to the exploring of human cognition. In order to express the human emotions accurately and vividly, we usually specified or conceptualize them, i.e. metaphorical. Metaphor plays an important role in the conceptualization of emotions.The study of metaphor witnesses a long history of over 2,000 years, generating rich theories on the subject. Traditional approaches to metaphor represented by Aristotle regarded metaphor as a rhetorical device functioning on the level of words and as a deviation from the ordinary mode of working of language. Until the mid-20th century, metaphor is regarded as a rhetoric method, a special speech act. That is to say, most of the people think about the metaphor only on the lever of words, but not concern about the thought. In the 1970s, there is a boom on metaphor research, especially in linguistics, psychology, symbols, philosophy etc. With the reflections carried out by researchers in various disciplines, metaphor obtains rebirth through its connection with thought. Among them the most important theory is the conceptual metaphor which is represented by Lakeoff and Johnson. The beginning of this new theory of metaphor is marked by the publication of Lakoff and Johnson's seminal book Metaphors We Live By in 1980. The central thesis of the theory is that metaphor is pervasive and ubiquitous in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. (Lakeoff & Johnson 1983:P3). Metaphor is a way of thinking. It is a basic ability of people to use the experience in a familiar cognitive domain to analyze and understand a new cognitive domain. Metaphor in essence is a perceptual and conceptualizing tool, by which human beings understand the surrounding world. Moreover, metaphor serves as an efficient source from which new meanings and new understanding rise. Their research has an epoch-making significance. And a lot of scholars started to pay attention to the cognitive process of metaphor.The present thesis studies the four basic emotions, i.e. happiness, sadness, anger and fear under the conceptual metaphor theory. I make a cognition analysis to the expressions of the four basic emotions in our daily life through the comparative way. According to the view of empirical realism, I discuss the similarities and differences between English and Chinese from the perspective of body experience and cultural mode. The contents of the present thesis will be divided into six parts. The first part is the introduction to the background, the objective and the general framework of the thesis. Chapter 1 is a review to the studies of emotion theories, and I abstract the four basic emotions in this part. i.e. happiness, sadness, anger and fear. Chapter 2 consists of theoretical framework of my study. I talk about the conceptual metaphor especially. As the main body of my thesis chapter 3 focuses on the differences and similarities of emotional expressions in English and Chinese. Chapter 4 is a comparison study of similarities and differences between English and Chinese in emotion metaphors from a cultural perspective Chapter 5 is the conclusion of the whole thesis.