Cognitive Analysis Of "Eye" Metaphor In English And Chinese

Human beings mapped every body parts in many ways onto the objective material world, in other word, human beings recognize the world surrounding themselves in the way of recognizing themselves. Human beings construct unfamiliar, abstract target domian in terms of their own body which was regarded as source domain, meanwhile forming cognition of body metaphor, constituting a large vocabulary of body metaphor, and achieving the goal of recognizing the strange world. Corpora relavant with body metaphor attract a great deal of concern of many linguists greatly, lots of articles introducing body metaphor in China and abroad have appeared, even some elaborate thesis and dissertations on body metaphor, but most of which are on"heart"metaphor and"hand"metaphor. Until now there is no"eye"metaphor elucidated in the perspective of cognition and the means of synchronic contrast between English and Chinese, so this thesis can compensate for the shortage of the case studies in the field of body metaphor. And this thesis'purposes are :firstly, on a case study of"eye"metaphor both in Chinese and English corpus to testify that human's cognition arises from body experiences and daily life experiences.Secondly, to analyze the mechanism of metaphor in the fields of linguistics and cognition, so to motivate understandings of"eye"metaphor in both Chinese and English. Finally, to reveal the similarities and diversities of"eye"metaphor under the effects of different cultures.There is a huge amount of"eye"metaphor expressions no matter in English or Chinese; and it both represents the process of cognition no matter mapping from eye to other objects, or mapping from other objects to eye, that is: Human being firstly understand their body and then they map features of body as the source domain onto other things as the target domains, which conforms to cognitive principle of processing from self to nonself, from simplicity to complication, from the near to the far, from familiarity to strangeness, from the concrete image to abstract impression. The present thesis is a constrastive research in the perspective of cognition on the base of synchronic corpora, which is composed of seven parts.The fisrt part is an introduction to this thesis. It contains the research background, the research purpose, the significances of the present study, and the structure of this thesis, which is a general description.Part two is the literature review. It consists of the introduction of metaphor study in the west and China. Metaphor study in the west includes classical view of metaphor, cognitive view of metaphor, conceptual metaphor, body metaphor.Part three is focused on introducing the framework, including the Lacoff and Johnson's Idealized cognitive models for the operation of metaphor in language which include three parts: image schema, metaphor, metonymy.Part four includes research questions, research approaches, research procedure, expected results. There are four research questions: 1.How are the two words eye and yan, as body concepts, used to conceptualize other non-body concepts along metaphorical path? 2.Are there similarity and difference between English and Chinese"eye"metaphor in metaphorical extention of meaning ? 3.What are the similarity and difference between English and Chinese"eye"metaphor in metaphorical extention, if there are similarity and difference between English and Chinese"eye"metaphor? 4.Why are there similarity and difference between English and Chinese"eye"metaphor ?Part five is on data collection, which includes the similar semantic category of"eye"corpora and their classification and diversities of semantic category and their classification. The corpora of"eye"metaphor is classified by the entries of the authorized dictionaries.Part six display all the corpora of"eye"metaphor both in Chinese and English, contrasting and analyzing all the corpora in the perspective of mapping, specifically mapping models are: 1.mapping from entity to the"eye", 2.mapping from orientation to the"eye", 3.mapping from other catogories to the"eye". In the ending part of this chapter the research questions are answered: 1."Eye"metaphor in both English and Chinese is constructed in the mapping, which is very important cognitive approach. 2. Similarity and difference of"eye"metaphor comform to one cognitive rule, which is that cognitive activities are rooted in everyday body experience, body experience is uniform and there exist universal metaphorical concepts; on the other hand, that body experience can not be independent of a certain culture and sociaty denotes that diversities between metaphoical systems in various cultures exist.The last part states the conclusions, including summary of the thesis, contribution and implications, suggestions for further studies.