Temperature Words And Their Images In Song Lyrics: A Study From The Cognitive Perspective

The Song Lyrics is a dazzling pearl on the crown of ancient Chinese literature, and it symbolizes the splendid literature of one generation. Together with Tang Poetry, Song Lyrics is rated as one of the two superb arts in the history of Chinese literature. It has received considerable attention from the perspective of the imagery, various literature schools, culture, and translation. However, researches on the temperature words in Song Lyrics are rare.According to the cognitive linguistics, physical, emotional, mental, cultural experiences are all basic groundings of our conceptual system, but people typically conceptualize the nonphysical in terms of the physical--that is, they conceptualize the less clearly delineated in terms of the more clearly delineated. As one of the basic cognitive domains of humans, the sense of temperature has brought a broad scope of temperature concepts. These concepts are mapped onto other domains which are more complex by metaphorical mappings or other means. The formation of those mappings is not simply for rhetorical effects, more importantly, it is an unconscious process of constructing the human conceptual system.This thesis takes temperature words in the Song Lyrics as the object of study and makes a systematic corpus-based study of them from the perspectives of ordinary metaphor, the synaesthetic metaphor and the metonymy. The analysis of them finally shows that the formation of the metaphors and metonymies is all grounded on people's bodily experience in an unconscious way. The results demonstrate particular characteristics in the use of temperature words in Song Lyrics.The systematic study in this thesis eventually leads to the following findings:(1) The mapping scope of temperature metaphors is wider than that of metonymies in our data. Specifically, there are 10 target domains (including 3 targets of synaesthetic metaphors) in temperature metaphor and 3 target domains in temperature metonymy. The richer instances of linguistic expressions of metaphors than metonymies prove that metaphor is more universal in people's conceptualization of the outside world and their life. Temperature also acts as the target domain onto which more concrete domains such as concrete object and liquid are mapped. This proves that people commonly conceptualize the less clearly delineated in terms of the more clearly delineated.(2) The three target domains of synaesthetic metaphors cover VISION, HEARING, and SMELL. The mappings of them basically follow the principle of "unidirectionality", that is, the sense of temperature is used to denote concepts of other senses, but not vice-versa. And the transfers tend to be from the lower to the higher senses. VISION acts as the most frequent recipient, which gives evidence for further studies of synaesthetic metaphors. TASTE acts as the source to map onto the TEMPERATURE, which to some extent reflects that TASTE is a more concrete sense than TEMPERATURE for people.(3) The use of temperature words of cold sensation and heat sensation is rather distinct in Song Lyrics. Firstly, the former mostly indicates negative concepts, such as bad emotion, indifferent attitude, inactive state, etc.. On the contrary, words of heat sensation mostly indicate positive concepts, such as joy, moderate temper, good economical situation, etc.. This phenomenon is mostly based on people's experience on different degrees of temperature. It is also influenced by the theory of Yin (阴) and Yang (阳) in Chinese philosophy. Secondly, temperature words of cold sensation occur more frequently than those of heat sensation. This may be due to the following three reasons:A) "coldness" causes more predominant experience to people than "hotness"; B) the historical background provides the Song Lyrics a sentimental atmosphere for literary creation; C) the musical style and the way of spreading of the Song Lyrics make its contents feminine.(4) The distribution of the temperature words of cold sensation and those of heat sensation in the works of the School of Wan Yue and the School of Hao Fang is rather distinct. A larger number of words which describe low temperature are used in the former school, which may be due to the particular life experience of the writers. This finding provides some evidence for the division of the School of Song Lyrics.All in all, the findings in this study further testify the claim that human cognition is derived from bodily experience and daily life. It reveals the characteristics of the construction of temperature conceptual system and reflects the features of the COLD images and HEAT images in Song Lyrics. In addition, the underlying reasons are also explored. This tentative research to some extent enriches metaphor, synaesthetic metaphor and metonymy studies in the field of cognitive linguistics, and provides some implications for further researches on Song Lyrics in the aspects of appreciation, school division, as well as translation.