| Nowadays, the role Public Service Advertisements (PSAs) play is becoming more and more important in our daily life, work and study. With the rapid development of our society and economy, people's living condition has improved greatly. However, various social problems and natural disasters begin to appear and become more and more serious at the same time, such as environmental pollution, immoral behaviors, hunger, drugs, earthquake, hurricane, etc. These problems cannot be removed radically with only the efforts of governments. The relief and solution of these problems also need the participation of the public. Everyone should make a difference to the harmony of our whole society. Thus, the development and researches of PSA become very important. This dissertation tries to apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory into the comparative analysis of English and Chinese (PSAs). Through the analysis, the author wants to find out the differences and similarities of conceptual metaphors between them. The socio-cultural reasons behind them will be included as well.Metaphor consists in giving a thing a name that belongs to something else, the transference being either from genus to species, from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy (Aristotle,1457). Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature (Lakoff & Johnson, 1987). Metaphor has been given wide attention to since the publication of Metaphors We Live By in 1980. In their book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson challenged the exclusive focus on metaphor as a poetic device for creating new insight, arguing instead that conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in our abstract conceptualization and reasoning (Johnson,2010). Lakoff and Johnson defined conceptual metaphor as a cross-domain mapping of structure from a source domain to a target domain, where the two domains are regarded as different kinds. From then on, different scholars have been studying metaphor from different perspectives. Based on 59 English PSAs (including 4374 English words) and 51 Chinese PSAs (including 4424 Chinese characters), the author first identified the conceptual metaphors in the data through careful examination. There are 173 conceptual metaphors in the Chinese PSAs, and there are 166 conceptual metaphors in the English PSAs. And then the author classified them into several types:Building Metaphors; War Metaphors; Journey Metaphors; Human Metaphors; Family Metaphors; Student Metaphors; Container Metaphors; Plant Metaphors; Fire Metaphors. Among these metaphors, the author found that the most frequently used conceptual metaphors in English PSAs are War Metaphors which take 21.7% among the whole conceptual metaphors in English PSAs, and the most frequently used type in Chinese PSAs is Family Metaphors which take 26% among the whole conceptual metaphors in Chinese PSAs. Fire Metaphors, Book Metaphors can only be found in the Chinese PSAs. In both kinds of data, Building Metaphors, Journey Metaphors, Human metaphors and Container Metaphors are widely used. The Chinese PSAs used much more Family Metaphors than the English PSAs. The English PSAs used much more War metaphors than the Chinese PSAs. After the analysis, the author further discussed the socio-cultural reasons behind them. This is just a try. Through this study, the author hopes that people can have a better understanding of the PSAs and the socio-cultural factors behind them when they hear or read them. What's more, the author hopes that people can be educated and influenced by the PSAs. Meanwhile the study is also very beneficial to the ones who want to do English-Chinese translation (or vice versa) on PSAs and those who want to set foot in PSAs at home and abroad or already in it. |
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