A Comparative Analysis Of The Cognition Of "Head" And "Heart" In Chinese And English

The cognitive linguistics theory in Metaphors We Live By written by linguists Lakoff and Johnson in 1980 laid a solid foundation for conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy. They stated that metaphor and metonymy were not only the linguistic matters, but also human’s thinking devices which are involved in human thinking process.The paper combines cognitive linguistic theory and the learning process of vocabulary in Chinese as the second language. It is helpful for learners to distinguish the relations between different items of one word and different words. On the basic meaning of one word, conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy theory can improve learning the abstract and complicated vocabularies.It can also enlarge the vocabulary and enhance the ability of using the vocabularies.The paper makes conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy theory the theory foundation to analyze Chinese and English words “head” and “heart” to get the conclusion that they have the similarities and differences in ways of human’s cognitive process. At last, the paper gives some strategies of teaching and learning Chinese vocabulary with conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy theory.