| Ever since the publication of Johnson and Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By in 1980, metaphor has been studied from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Cognitivists thought that metaphor was not only a figure of speech, but also a mode of thought. Human beings recognize and understand abstract things through it. Spatial metaphor is one of the most interesting subjects in cognitive linguistic study. As many abstract concepts are constituted by spatial concept, Lakoff and Johnson put forward the concept of spatial metaphor and elaborated its empirical basis, that is image schema. On the basis of the previous studies of metaphor and image schema, the present thesis aims to describe and classify the spatial meanings and the metaphorical extensions of high/low and gao(高)/di(低), and tries to identify and analyze their similarities and differences from the cognitive point of view.Due to the fact that using corpus as our research data source can provide us with more authentic and objective data, and there is inadequate study in the comparison of English and Chinese spatial words by using corpus as research instrument, the present study uses the corpus-based approach as a methodology to analyze the similarities and differences between high and gao(高), and low and di(低) from the perspective of conceptual metaphor. The present study examines similarities and differences between English high/low and Chinese gao(高)/di(低) in five semantic domains, namely spatial, quantity, stata, position and sensation through direct occurrence frequency comparison of their noun collocates. What the study has found out through both qualitative and quantitative analyses is that the spatial image-schematic structures of English high/low and Chinese gao(高)/di(低) can be mapped onto nearly the same four target domains. In addition to this, the four domains of high and gao(高) are arranged in nearly the same order of frequency, that is, quantity, position, state and sensation. And the four domains of low and di(低) are also arranged in the same order, that is quantity, state, position and sensation. However, there are some differences between their metaphorical extensions. Based on the analysis and the interpretation of the collocates of English words high/low and Chinese characters gao(高)/di(低), the study proves the fact that there may exist a universal metaphorical concept among people from different countries and different cultures. And the spatial words'metaphorical extensions, which are always transformed from their spatial meanings, are grounded in our daily experience and knowledge. As for implications, the analysis may promote the linguistic research and foreign language teaching. The whole study inevitably has some limitations. For example, the spatial words chosen in the thesis are not enough, the corpus data of the study are rather limited and the classification of spatial words may be subjective to some degree. Although we have such problems, the findings of the study are essentially in accordance with the real language use and fits academic research methodology. |
