A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In English And Chinese

The study of metaphors witnesses a long history, which can be traced back to the time of Aristotle. However, metaphor study has been traditionally confined to the field of rhetoric and that of language. The traditional theories about metaphor include the Comparison Theory, the Substitution Theory and the Interaction Theory. The publication in 1980 of Lakoff and Johnson's work Metaphors We Live By marks the establishment of the cognitive approach to metaphor, which is recognized as a great breakthrough in the field of metaphor study. In the past two decades, metaphor study has become quite popular in the field of cognitive science. According to this cognitive theory, the essence 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.Conceptual metaphor, an important concept in Lakoff's metaphor theories, is rooted in our bodily experience. Based on Lakoff and Johnson's theories on conceptual metaphor, this paper makes a contrastive study of some major conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese to find out the similarities and differences between the conceptual metaphors in the two languages and explores the causes of the similarities and differences from the cognitive as well as the cultural perspectives. The research discovers that English and Chinese share some similar conceptual metaphors. The similarities reflect the fact that conceptual metaphors are primarily rooted in common human bodily experience both in English and Chinese. Meanwhile, there also exist great differences which are largely due to cultural relativity. Thus, this paper tries to account for these differences by referring to the differences in geographical locations, traditions and customs, philosophical theories and religions.The contrastive study in this paper further verifies the fact that conceptual metaphor is characterized by cognitive universality and cultural relativity. This research, to a certain degree, supplements the previous studies of the contrastive studies of conceptual metaphors by other scholars. It will facilitate the metaphor comprehension in cross-cultural communication, and offer help to translation, foreign language learning and teaching.