| Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a particular rhetorical device. However, in recent years, cognitive scientists believe that metaphor serves as an important means of man's thinking. In nature, metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon. As a basic cognitive structure, metaphor allows us to comprehend a relatively abstract concept by virtue of a more concrete concept. The cognitive law that man cognizes things from the near to the far, from entity to non-entity, from the simple to the complex, and from the concrete to the abstract determines the basic role of body parts in cognizing the world. This thesis, by applying the theories of cognitive linguistics and comparing metaphors of body parts in English and Chinese, aims to study the homogeneity and heterogeneity of mechanisms and the reasons.The cognitive law that man cognizes things from the near to the far, from entity to non-entity, from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract determines the basic role of human body in cognizing the world. By means of the body organs and parts they are mostly familiar with, people often form body metaphorical concepts so as to know about, experience and feel about the metaphorical concepts of other domains. Therefore, body metaphor is in nature a kind of conceptual metaphor, and it is a main cognitive method of human beings. By means of body metaphor, people perceive and understand the complicated and abstract concepts. At the same time, body metaphor reveals that human body and the embodied experience play an important role in people's understanding the outside world. Up to now, some scholars have made a delicate classification and contrastive study of body metaphor in English and Chinese. And some scholars have done studies on one or a certain body part metaphor. However, the comprehensive study on body metaphor concerning all the body part words is still not enough. In view of this fact, this thesis chooses human body words as the study object and centers on three aspects: the status of human body words in language and cognition, the mapping of human body word, and similarities and differences of English and Chinese human body words mapping. The thesis is a qualitative and quantitative analysis that explores and reveals the above aspects of human body words. It is hoped that the study will help us to get a better understanding of human body words. This paper takes up body metaphor as its topic to study, based on the analysis of a large amount of linguistic data from English and Chinese in terms of body metaphors. The research discovers that Chinese and English share many main body metaphors. These similarities reflect the fact that body metaphors are primarily rooted in common human bodily experience both in English and Chinese. Meanwhile, there still exist great differences, which are mainly from the different culture and reference point.This paper makes a relatively complete study of body metaphors from the cognitive perspective. Based on the comparative and contrastive study in English and Chinese, this research reinforces some theories of the contemporary cognitive approach to metaphor: body metaphor is characterized by cognitive universality and cultural relativity. Meanwhile, it will, to a certain degree, supplement the study of body metaphor. In addition, this research will be helpful to the vocabulary teaching in English and Chinese. |
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