A Comparative Study Of Emotional Metaphors About Surprise Between English-Chinese

Metaphor has captured hundreds of scholars'attention for more than 2000 years. In traditional view, metaphor is regarded as a figure of speech, used especially in poetry. The cognitive linguistics'rising, however, led to a new recognition of the role of metaphor. Metaphor is an important way for people to think and reason, it is involved in human cognitive process. Besides, metaphor is an important means of man's understanding of the world. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980:4) maintain, "metaphor is pervasive 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." In short, rather than linguistic, metaphor is cognitive.Emotion is the most basic experience of human beings, but it is also the most important experience. During the past decades, cognitive linguists have conducted a great number of researches, which studies on the function of metaphor in the conceptualization of emotions in English and in Chinese. These studies demonstrate that "human emotions, which are abstract in nature, are largely conceptualized and expressed in metaphorical terms. It is virtually impossible to talk about emotions without conceptualizing them metaphorically." (Kovecses,1990,2000)Those so-called basic emotions, such as happiness, anger, sadness, anxiety, and love are largely studied by the previous studies. Few studies are conducted to focus on the non-basic emotion metaphors such as surprise metaphor. Consequently, there is an absence of comprehensive study on surprise metaphor, especially in Chinese. Therefore, this thesis chooses the conceptual metaphor of surprise as its topic to study on.A large number of surprise metaphors in both Chinese and English are investigated in this thesis. It is found that English and Chinese share some major conceptual metaphors such as A PHYSICAL FORCE, A NATURAL FORCE, A FLUID IN A CONTAINER, LOCATION (CONTAINER), AN OBJECT, etc. However, some differences also exist, Chinese and English do not share the conceptual metaphor-SURPRISE IS SOMETHING CAN BE EATEN, nor do they share the metonymy-action of nature stands for surprise.This study supports that, in expressing abstract emotion like surprise, metaphor is in everywhere and cannot be gotten out, that is why metaphor appears to be so essential in human understanding and speaking. It also supplies evidence to support Lakoff and Kovecses's (1986) view that emotional concepts are embodied, that is to say, they have a basis in bodily experience.