The Cognitive Analysis Of Human Body Metaphors In English And Chinese

Metaphor is a universal phenomenon in human languages. Due to its close relationship with language, metaphor has attracted the attention of many scholars from various fields for more than 2000 years. Traditionally, metaphor was viewed as a figure of speech in the word level, and primarily decorative and ornamental in nature. So at that time, the study of metaphor was almost confined to the literature and rhetoric field. The publication of Metaphors We Live by, written by Lakoff and Johnson, marks the outset of the cognitive study of metaphor. In the book, the authors claim that metaphor is pervasive in our language and thought and it is not only a figure of speech, but also more fundamentally a form of thought, a way of thinking. And as a basic cognitive structure, metaphor allows us to comprehend a relatively abstract concept by virtue of a more concrete concept.The basic cognitive law for people to know the world is from the near to the far, from the simple to the complicated, from the familiar things to the unfamiliar ones, and from the concrete to the abstract. So people from all over the world always follow the regular cognitive pattern, that is, people always take their own body as the yardmark to measure the things around the outside world. They apply the cognitive experience of human body to the cognition of other things, and project the concept of human body to the other concepts, hence constructing the new concepts, and this is what we called human body metaphorization. (Xun Miao,2008) In the early ages of human being, the primitive people projected their own body parts or organs to the outside world in various ways, thus knowing the world constantly by the cognitive way of human body metaphorization. Therefore, it is obvious to see that the human cognition firstly derives from the body themselves. Human body metaphorization plays a vital role in helping people to understand the outside world and it can be viewed as an important tool for people to construct new concepts and further cognize the new outside world. However, because different people in different countries have different geographical environment and cultural background, so human body metaphors also possess different features in different languages.Thus, through a study of human body metaphors, we human being can perceive and understand the complicated and abstract concepts. Based on the conceptual metaphor theory and cross-domain mapping theory put forward by Lakoff and Johnson, and through a detailed analysis to the human body metaphorical expressions both in English and Chinese, this paper intends to answer the following questions:1. How the human body related metaphorical expressions in the two languages are constructed? And how do we understand and explain them?2. How do we explain the similarities and differences between English and Chinese body metaphors?At the same time, this thesis also gives an analysis to the various mapping models of English and Chinese body related metaphorical expressions, and it finally concludes that:1. Different language systems reflect a similar cognitive rule of human being. That is to say, human beings use their own concrete bodily experience to get to know the abstract concepts, thus reaching the goal of constantly understanding and cognizing the outside world.2. Human being's cognition to the world began with their own bodies, and human body metaphors are characterized by cognitive universality which is based on humai being's common bodily experience but also shows obvious cultural characteristics.