A Cognitive Approach To English And Chinese Human Body Idioms

Metonymy and metaphor have been traditionally studied in the fields of rhetoric and linguistics. Over the past decade, the study of metonymy and metaphor has become increasingly popular in the field of cognitive science. According to the milestone works of Lakoff & Johnson (1980) on metaphor and Radden & Kovecses (1999) on metonymy, the essence of metaphor and metonymy is conceptual rather than linguistic. With their basis in experientialism, or the embodied philosophy, the two conceptual processes have great explanatory power for interpreting language phenomena, including idioms, called the essence of language.The thesis is centered on the most common idioms—human body idioms. They are reported to be most productive of metaphor- and metonymy-based idiomatic expressions. However, there is not much literature about human body idioms from the cognitive perspective. Although there is adequate study on Human Body Metaphor both at home and abroad, not much attention is attached to metonymies that are characteristic of human body. In view of these, the thesis makes a cognitive study on human body idioms and attempts to find out the major cognitive mechanisms that motivate them, on the basis of the detailed analysis of a large amount of working data from authoritative English and Chinese dictionaries of idioms. The research discovers that conceptual metonymy plays the most active role in motivating the human body idioms in both languages and the two languages share common metonymic models in general, reflecting the fact that people have common experience with their bodies and traditionally tend to conceptualize the world, particularly human activities, with their own bodies. The metonymic commonalities also confirm the well recognized cognitive and perceptual principles proposed by Radden & Kovecses (1999). It is a similar case in conceptual metaphor—the less active mechanism in these idioms, which is also rooted in experientialism. Apart from the three important cognitive mechanisms proposed by Lakoff (1987) in the cognition of idioms—conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy and general knowledge, the cooperation of two or even three of the mechanisms is found to be of certain importance in understanding human body idioms. Meanwhile, there still exist a few differences between the cognitive features of English and Chinese human body idioms. These differences are manifested mainly in three aspects: Chinese idioms are particularly rich in "heart" expressions and expressions of some other internal organs; Chinese idioms are also abundant with expressions in which two body parts co-occur, with the two body parts in three different relationships; English human body idioms are characteristic of the conversion of body parts into verbal use. They are attributed respectively to the traditional Chinese medicine, the thinking mode of opposites and unity, the cultural psychology of symmetry and harmony of the Han nationality, and the distinctive feature of English lexical evolution.The thesis makes a relatively comprehensive study of human body idioms in English and Chinese from a cognitive perspective. It reinforces, to some degree, some theories in the contemporary cognitive approach to metonymy and metaphor. It will be a supplement to the cognitive study of idioms.