A Cognitive Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Love Metaphors

In the traditional rhetoric,metaphor is only a figure of speech,a way of expression in which one thing is compared to another by saying that one is the other, leaving out such words as "as" or "like".Properly using metaphor can make literature works more innovative and impressive.People usually think only poets and writers can excellently employ metaphors.The research on metaphor rhetoric can trace back to Aristotle and his view has influenced the world for over 2000 years.Until the rising of cognitive linguistics in the 1980s,the function of metaphor has been reevaluated. In the newly emerging cognitive linguistics,metaphor occupies a very important position:it is an important tool to help us to better know this world.The founder of cognitive linguistics,Lakoff and Johnson believe that metaphor is pervasive in language and thinking;it occupies an important position and it can be regarded as a way of thinking.The conception system of human beings inevitably consists of metaphor.Metaphor has effect on the thinking and cognition of human beings,and also appears in daily life.The nature of metaphor is to understand and experience one thing through another thing.The metaphor expression in language is the superficial embodiment of metaphor thinking and the cultural background knowledge is the language environment of metaphor,the source of metaphor concept formation and the rich land for research on metaphor thinking.It is well known that love is a permanent topic of literature works and love is also one of the most pervasive and mysterious and complicated and abstract emotions. There are plenty of rich conceptual metaphors of love in English and Chinese.People usually rely on concrete objects to depict love.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,this thesis aims to support modem metaphor theory through the comparative analysis of English and Chinese love metaphors.It is found that there are similar conceptual metaphors of love in both English and Chinese,for example, "journey","war",and "plant" and so on,because conceptual metaphor is rooted in oneself experience;however,there are also differences arising from profound influence of English and Chinese cultures on the love conceptualization,for example Christianity,ancient Greek and Roman cultures in English,and Taoism,Buddhism, Confucianism and so on in Chinese.This thesis proves that metaphor has both universality and diversity and metaphor exerts important functions for human beings to understand abstract objects and objective world.That also conforms to the theory that the formation of metaphor is based on the experience of human beings.Moreover,every experience of human beings occurs in specific cultural background and cultural model,thus,metaphor has exuberant cultural characteristics.Cultural relativity results in the concept differences among different nations.This thesis provides a new perspective for metaphor research and is useful to deeply understand the relations between metaphor and culture,and between metaphor and thinking.Meanwhile,it also lets people understand love concept more clearly and it is helpful for understanding cultural issues in foreign language teaching.