Chinese Diet Idiom Metaphor - The Cognitive And Cultural Perspective

Idiom is the essence of Chinese vocabulary. Chinese food culture, which synchronized with the Chinese nation's history, has a great impact on the formation and use of the idiom. Various aspects of Chinese diet almost all be reflected in Chinese idioms. "Diet" is one of the most fundamental human nature experience. This recurring natural experience solidified to gestalt experience, which will has a strong cognitive. When it is combined with a particular culture, it will generate the metaphor with the culture features. China has a rich food culture. Food-related metaphor is applied to various aspects of social life. The Chinese language is a rich treasure trove of metaphor in language cases. Therefore, we collected a thousand of idioms and conduct research and analysis of them, in the framework of cognitive linguistics, using cognitive metaphor theory and relevant theories of culture linguistics. The purpose of the study of diet idioms:(1) Using cognitive metaphor theory analyzes Chinese diet idioms to refine conceptual metaphor, in order to better understand how people will project the familiar and specific diet area to other unfamiliar and abstract areas. In turn, further proof metaphor theory, deepen the understanding of metaphor and theoretical study of the metaphor. (2) Through the cultural perspective of Chinese diet idioms, we will be better understand China's traditional culture, customs and ideas. At the same time, it also provides a reference for the teaching of Chinese idioms and cross-cultural communication. As for the research methods, we will use the method of description and analysis and do further analysis on the basis of classification and statistics. The results are as follows:(1) Through the classification of diet idioms, we found that all aspects of Chinese diet, almost all be reflected in Chinese idioms and metaphorical projection fields of the diet idioms are wide:Involved in things landscape, character, thoughts and feelings, culture and education, military and economy, politics and law, language and arts, emulated events, and social life. (2) Through the identification and refining of the conceptual metaphor, we found the following characteristics:A. The main types of metaphor include structural metaphor and ontological metaphor, in which ontological metaphor occupies a large proportion.B. Double source domain. Diet idioms exist the phenomenology that pairs of the source domain map to the same target domain. C. The metaphor structure assumes the netted distribution. Chinese diet idioms include a wealth of conceptual metaphor. The same source domain projects to multiple target domains or multiple source domains project to the same target domain, which woven into the metaphorical structure of networks. (3) Through the cultural perspective of Chinese diet idioms, we understand that China's social and historical character, perspective of people's value judgments and spirit pursuit, and simple cognitive style.