A Corpora-based And Exemplified Contrastive Study Of Body Metaphors In Chinese And English

Traditionally, metaphors have been confined to the studies of rhetoric and linguistics. Major theories thus developed to account for it include the Comparison theory, the Substitution theory and the interaction theory. Seen in this light, metaphors are regarded as "poetic gaudiness" and are a language-internal phenomenon, not directly related to the thought.The big break for studies of metaphor comes with the publication of the seminal book Metaphors We Live By (1980). In it, the coauthors Lakoff and Johnson claim that concepts, which man uses to organize thoughts and create connections between entities, are metaphorical in nature. Metaphors, according to them, go beyond being just a rhetorical device or a poetical ornament. In fact, they are present in every layer of language, through conception to execution. Among them, what is called conceptual metaphor takes the central seat, which refers to the deep-rooted thinking mechanism of identifying an abstract concept with another, more basic and concrete one. In other words, it helps us to understand one kind of concept (here called "target domain") in terms of another kind (here called "source domain"). So, according to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors are, in nature, cross-domain projections.This approach to metaphors proves immensely popular among scholars worldwide. During the 1990s, its heat is felt by scholars at home. In a few years, an inundation of books and papers are devoted to its introduction and explanatiion. Shu Dingfang (2000), Zhao Yanfang (2001) and Hu Zhuanglin (2004) are among the first to bring this perspective on metaphor to the home readers. Meanwhile, scholars at home are working on their own explanations within the framework set up by Lakoff & Johnson (1980).In this paper, the author tries to contribute to the present research field by examining the conceptual metaphor from the similarities and differences between its incarnations in Chinese and English. Besides, by incorporating the widely available online corpora in his study, the author hopes to show that internet with its vast resources and technologies are a huge asset to future linguistic researches.